I have spent a lot of time defending Hillary Clinton over the last couple of weeks because of the silly nature of the attacks against her. The infamous "crying" episode is the most obvious example of this phenomenon.
When it comes to the absurd personality based coverage of the major media outlets, she can't catch a break. They can't make up their minds whether she laughed or cried too much or too little. The only thing that is guaranteed is that she is guilty of all of the above, no matter what.
Other than being ridiculous, this criticism also misses the real problem with Senator Clinton. There is ample ground on which to criticize the junior Senator from New York. She has surrounded herself with accomodationists and triangulators. Her advisors seem to constantly tell her to give half a loaf to the George Bush and Dick Cheney led Republicans until almost the whole loaf is gone.
Other critics have done a better job of analyzing her advisors and her triangulation better than I can hope to do here. So, I want to focus on the one overwhelming problem with Hillary Clinton.
She claims that George W. Bush is the worst president we've ever had. Yet in her entire time in the Senate she has never led one successful fight against him. She has either lost every legislative battle on Iraq, or worse yet, been complicit. The vote to authorize the war was one thing, but how about all of the votes to continue and support Bush's war for all of the remaining years? Let alone every other issue on which Bush got exactly what he wanted, up to and including this year, when the Democrats and Senator Clinton were theoretically in charge.
I understand that leaders are supposed to lead. Yet, I have never seen Senator Clinton lead her fellow Democrats in a successful challenge of President Bush. Never. That's a pretty awful record.
Now, it would be one thing if George Bush was a popular president who was hard to defeat politically. But in fact, he is the opposite. He is the most deeply unpopular president of our lifetimes. And Hillary Clinton kept getting her ass kicked by that guy.
That's the real criticism that should be leveled against Hillary Clinton. Yet I have almost never seen anyone make this point on TV. Part of the reason for that, of course, is because her opponents, Barack Obama and John Edwards did no better in their time in the Senate. So, they are embarrassed into an awkward silence on the matter.
The reason I hold Senator Clinton to a higher standard, other than the fact that she has been there longer, is that she had the biggest name recognition and could have led her fellow Democrats -- but chose not to. Instead she chose accommodation and capitulation. That's a record worth criticizing, if anyone ever got around to it.
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Posted January 13, 2008 | 12:31 AM (EST)