Dear Hillary: There Is No Day One

Sometime in the mid-1990s I recall saying that if Hillary Clinton ever ran for president, I'd quit my job and go to work on her campaign. Over the years I changed my mind. By the time she did announce her candidacy for president I was saying, "If she is elected, I might have to leave the country." But, during this long election season, at the dozenth or so debate point, I began to feel that I had perhaps been rash. The woman did seem to have experience, smarts, toughness, and
Washington savvy. Sometimes she even made some of the men in the initial field look like amateurs. Now she just makes everyone else look incredibly decent, ethical, and fair.

This is typical of the roller coaster ride that is the Clinton's story. I had such hopes for both of them on January 20, 1993. Which brings us to why there is no Day One and can never be a Day One for Hillary. If she were elected, January 20, 2009 would actually be Day 5845 for her, that is, if we count the days since Bill Clinton was sworn in as 42nd president and his two-for-one presidency began. Since she is leveraging their joint White House legacy in the current
campaign, and if all that experience is supposed to count, it seems fair to look at things that way.

Yesterday, or Day 5523, I decided I was done with giving Hillary Clinton the benefit of the doubt. This is so clearly Barack Obama's moment that I wish that the Democratic Party apparatus that she and Bill are no doubt cajoling, bribing, threatening, and blackmailing at this very moment would tell her to get lost. The Red Phone ad, and the deliberate hesitancy in asserting the non-issue of Obama's religion - not to mention her failure to bring up her experience of attending congressional members' Christian prayer breakfasts with him when she was asked about the Muslim rumor - eroded any fragile hope I had of her rising above the petty and the political. To me her answer, as so much of what she says, is leveraged as an opportunity, in this case to give the speculation oxygen rather than to cut it off.

In the answer below, substitute "I know he is a Christian" for "as far as I know" and you'll see what I mean about opportunism.

"KROFT: You don't believe that he's a Muslim? HILLARY: No. No. Why would I? There's no ... No. There's nothing to base that on - as far as I know."

The negative campaigning leading up to her desperate bid for Ohio and Texas was the final straw. I have little doubt that the Hillary I am seeing now is part of a longtime pattern. Those days since January 1993 have been a terrible mix of political missteps, centrist
compromises, expediency, psychodrama, a failure to both live up to the youthful Clinton ideals and to understand how to achieve them in Washington, and amoral ambition. I'll grant that there were enough successes to make me love Bill Clinton in spite of his compromises and
his enormous personal shortcomings. Given his successor in the White House, it was enough to make one weep with longing every time that Bill spoke. Oh, to have a president with a brain again!

And then Bill hit the campaign trail for Hillary, behaving in a way that made it impossible to forget the man who had betrayed the best hopes of his wife, his daughter, his friend Al Gore, his party, and his country for the sake of a few minutes of bizarre sexual gratification. It wasn't about the sex; it was the puerile bid for attention, the enormity of his self-indulgence, and his lack of
character that came to mind again and again every time the man campaigned for his wife.

When we look at the Days, there is a long and sad and dirty trail of history that makes the Day One slogan both appalling and ridiculous. It would have been compelling and stirring if this indeed were Hillary's moment, but the dual Clinton story has doomed her to tragedy that would be Shakespearean if it were not so cheesy. It's time to get her off the stage, or let her act out her part as a Senator. I want no more of the Clinton maneuvering, politicking, cunning, blundering, and alternating meanness and expediently misty-eyed authenticity in my White House.

Finally, the thought of Bill Clinton in the White House again, butting in, eating donuts, wandering the halls, and goodness knows what else, takes away my appetite. I have every confidence that he would screw things up for both of them again (although she seems quite able to do
that on her own). And then we'd have only a four year Democratic run, hampered by unceasing Clinton static, and by another Republican regime. The question is not just one of whether she
is electable. Would she be re-electable? As for that morally repugnant ad, I have the feeling that when the red phone rang at 3:00 AM, it'd be Bill who grabbed the receiver. Imagine Hillary gripping his wrist in mid-air and screaming, "It's my turn, goddammit!" And I doubt very
much that our children would be safer with Hillary in the White House with Bill in tow. Certainly not if your child happens to be a White House intern.

Comments

[margie4]

This is brilliant and very insightful.. Ms. Weaver should be adopted as a regular by HuffPost.
What no one will publicly say, however, is the saddest truth of all: that many, many previous Hillary supporters are so appalled by her behaviour that they will not vote for her in November, no matter what the ramifications of a McCain presidency are.
The glorious hope and enthusiasm that began this Democratic primary season have curdled into something so nauseating and scummy feeling that most of us turn away from it into a place of relatively benign denial. Denial and disengagement is so much easier than rather than confronting the insidious power and dishonesty of the unfortunately successful tactics of the Clinton campaign. Pop in a CD of Bach flue sonatas; read One Hundred Years of Solitude; buy two dozen roses and carefully place them in arresting arrangements around your house. But do NOT focus on Ms. Clinton or the primary campaigns, it will disturb your serenity for weeks.
No one wants to feel as if politics makes them want to have an endless succession of baths, but we must resist the temptation to detach. If we all were as forthright as Ms. Weaver, and as courageous, there is no doubt that hope and decency and, yes, common political sense, will prevail in the end.
Go Lynn. Keep on telling the truth.

[mawrm]

Her response on 60 Minutes to the Muslim smear question did it for me. I have to evaluate her on two bases, one as a sworn-in-elected official of the US Senate of whom honesty, integrity and an unwavering commitment to the truth is required and secondly, as a Christian where the defense of the truth to death is demanded by our faith. And she failed miserably on both accounts in her response to the question. As a Christian, Sen. Hillary Clinton should be very aware of that most basic of commandments - thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Considering she had publicly lectured Obama to "reject and denounce" Farrakan for his unsolicited support for him based on false, anti-Semitic claims Farrakan had made years ago, it would seem to me that she would have had a better answer to the question than "as far as I know". Further, to consider that this is someone who had to apologize and fire staffers for e-mailing out the very Muslim smear she was being asked about makes her offense unforgiveable. It is clear that her apology to Obama in that case, which Obama was gracious enough to accept, was insincere and completely fake.
Going back to the Bible, if one can not be trusted in such little things as these (denouncing false Muslim smears of a fellow Democrat), how and why should they be trusted to handle bigger matter that require an even greater commitment to truth, honesty and integrity?