Mrs. America

In a recent post, Matthew Palevsky of The Real News offers a thoughtful interview with Tom Hayden, who wrestles with Palevsky's question: "Why Is Clinton Pandering to the Right?"

Senator Clinton is not pandering to the right, not exactly. She's pandering to America.

She's pandering to those who are more ignorant and less intelligent and more bitter and more frightened and clinging more desperately to guns and religion than she is, because she wants them to think she is like them, so they will vote for her. Those people aren't "the right," are they? They're just ordinary Americans who kind of like the idea of obliterating a whole country full of bad people; who could care less that their leaders met in the White House to assign various tortures to various prisoners; who are tired of all the yapping about torture. (They don't mind if somebody on our team tortures bad people. But only bad people! because we're good people!) She's pandering to the people who don't demand an end to this war (they do think it was a mistake, though). She's pandering to people who don't demand the impeachment of admitted war criminals. She's pandering to people who don't object to their country's probably irreversible slide into fascism. (They don't have any real idea what that means, but they do know that it is a crazy left-wing fringe thing to say things like that and to call people fascists, whatever it means.)

She's pandering to the great ignorant, frightened, belligerent, selfish American middle, to the independents, the Reagan Democrats, the disaffected Republicans who don't want the government raising taxes or borrowing, the shopper-Democrats who are for peace, sure, but a little nervous that soft-hearted liberals won't really know how to or be able to defend the country. She's pandering to the people who gather together in the middle, united by their fear and the yearning to have somebody tough enough running things, somebody who will protect them (without, of course, charging them for the service).

Everything Hillary Clinton says and does is carefully calculated to get the most possible votes. She voted against the Levin Amendment and for the Iraq War authorization (without bothering to read the NIE) because she calculated that if she wanted to be President she would have to demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that God has somehow blessed her with Falkland Island-sized balls. (Falkland balls, as everyone knows, are better than the real but unreliable balls of liberal male war heroes). She voted for the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment for the same reason. And all her talk while she was in campaign heat in Pennsylvania -- all her talk about killing ducks and Iranians, about massive retaliation and immediate obliteration -- was just her Goldwater Girl equivalent of the padded display little W sported in his flight suit on the day he declared the mission accomplished.

I guess it worked, too. She needed a big victory in Pennsylvania, and nucular jingo evidently sounded good enough to enough bitter voters there to give her almost the double-digit win she longed for.

She's pandering to America. She wants to harvest the greatest number of possible votes from every action, every statement, every soundbite, every slur, every insinuation, every attack, every mindless whining repetition ("Day One, Day One, Day One!"). She's not worried about my vote, of course, or Mark Palevsky and Tom Hayden's votes, or the votes of anyone reading this. Her calculation is that we don't matter so much (especially compared to the new friends she is attracting from the Fox News-Rush Limbaugh-Richard Mellon Scaife circles). Her calculation is that Mark and Tom and I won't vote for McCain or Nader or stay home or throw away our votes: we'll move to the middle, because what else can we do, and vote for her, too, because we have to. So why not go after all those voters who don't have to vote for her but will when they see she has what it takes?

Another calculation is that the superdelegates will have to give her the nomination because they know the Party can't afford to contest the election with a nominee who is merely thoughtful and gentle and decent and diplomatic, a wimp of peace, with good judgment and character, a man with no prominently-displayed or symbolically-referenced ("massive!" "obliterate!") testicles. The Party has to have a candidate with real National Security balls, Hillary Clinton knows we all know that, so there she goes, Mrs. America, striding by poor old doddering confused McCain, head up, arms swinging, and, as she moves across that great Commander-in-Chief threshold, ostentatiously adjusting her cup.

Comments

[Zanti]

I guess the great thing about Huff-Po is that it gives us the chance to hear from the ideological opposites of neo-cons--i.e., their extremist counterparts. Like yourself.

After a little dose of both sides, the middle doesn't seem so bad at all. Thank you.

[oldpotsmuggler]

Hey Frank: I have no doubt that, were you the one, you would have accepted the challenge to go one on one against Sen. Hillary. And based on this rant you would have scored some good points.

Now why is it that the other Sen. doesn't seem to want to meet in what would almost certainly prove to be a winner take all encounter. Things are certainly going to get tougher than this if and when he goes up against Ahmedinajad.

[Zanti]

Yeah, he could ask her about her cup.

[wondering]

Yes. Yes.

The hell of it is that Obama's "god and guns" comment was dead on. But not just for Pennsylvanians. I live in a college town in mid-state New York - a supposedly liberal State - and the mindless conservativism of the great unwashed around here is frightening.

I never want to hear another left-of-the-center commentator on Huffpo, or anywhere else, praising America or trumpeting their patriotism until they explain the two terms of Nixon, two terms of Reagan, and two terms of Little George that I have lived through in my lifetime. And that's just for starters.

People who reflexively defend the US or its citizenry (read: voters), are just knee-jerk jingoists. You know, if it really were easy to change one's nationality, there is nothing that would keep me from moving to Canada. They've got better health care, I hear. And fewer gun-deaths per capita.

[Pieface]

Hillary is appealing to real America, and you know it.

[trevor01]

Yeah, she'd doing and saying what it takes to win the general election. She gets it and so she'll win it. Now, why isn't that good enough for this blogger and so many others on this site?

[Atticus]

Barring your snide cynicism, you are essentialy correct. Hillary is "pandering" to salt-of-the-earth Americans, those whose blood, sweat and toil created our greatness.

So Hillary is on target. Manifest Destiny is not a quaint concept from the 19th Century. It is alive and strong. This blighted earth will not find true peace and prosperity until the destiny of the American People is fulfilled. These are the people for whom Hillary speaks!

[gayleg]

Oh my gosh, you mean she's actually saying things people want to hear?

It's like she's running for office or something !

She's indefatigable. Stronger than ever after this last full year of rigorous campaigning.

Go Hillary!

[Zanti]

"Oh my gosh, you mean she's actually saying things people want to hear?"

Worse yet, she doesn't hate the people! How dare she not hate them? :-)

You're supposed to despise the people you represent, apparently. Strikes me as an odd philosophy, but what do I know?

[JLindsley]

Wow!

[MPeter]

Great article. Hillary has always been on the darker side of America. When she chuckles about Cheney are being Darth Vedar, she is actually talking about herself as the gun-slinging, beer-guzzling, bitter blue-collar work who grew up in Sranton. The sad part is that America still has a big segment of people who are so ignorant and so ammenable to the fear card, she, her husband and the power-hungry surrogates fall for it every time. To that group, I reluctantly add a segment of old feminists like Madeline Albright, Gloria Steinem and Geraldine Ferraro among others could care less how many children or people Hillary obliterates. Great article.

[syllepsis]

What is truly pathetic is the Democrats have behaved exactly as predicted. The conventional wisdom is that Dems only win when tasking as closely to Republican deceit as possible ("triangulation"). So when a nation sick and angry at what Republicans had gone to our country gave the Democrats Congress in 2006, every cynic predicted that the Democrats would do nothing. The cynics were right.
There are more soldiers in Iraq than there were in November 2006. The economy is collapsing under the weight of Bush's unopposed economic policies and vanity war. People trust the Government less than than they did in 2006, and that is unbelieveable, because the Republicans were drubbed precisely because no one except the 25 percenters trusted them for a second. The 25 percenters still think that the Government is doing a heck of a job. They will vote for McCain, of course. Whose vote have the Democrats in Congress been angling for? The 25 percenters', of course. It never changes.
Pelosi, Reid, Emanuel, et al. gave Hillary the cue to run like this (not in their words, but in their example, which is nothing less than reprehensible). Why, exactly, is there a Democratic party?

[jfor]

Ain't Democracies great?