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And Hillary Wants to Run the Country? Part IV

This might explain Part III:

Hillary Clinton spends considerable time on the campaign trail bemoaning unscrupulous lenders who have left millions of Americans scrambling to keep their homes but all the while her campaign manager, Margaret “Maggie” Williams, has sat on the board of one of the nation’s once-largest and now-bankrupt sub-prime mortgage lenders.

FoxNews

And Hillary Wants to Run The Country? Part III

I’ve posted previously on the irony that Clinton wants to run the country but can’t run a campaign.  Is this how she will pay for Hillarycare?

Among the debts reported this month by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, the $292,000 in unpaid health insurance premiums for her campaign staff stands out.

Clinton, who is being pressured to end her campaign against Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination, has made her plan for universal health care a centerpiece of her agenda.

Clinton didn’t pay health insurance bills - Kenneth P. Vogel - Politico.com

Ignoring the obvious implication that her campaign is financially inept, how is it that her campaign is stupid enough to let something like this happen, politically?  Here’s another free piece of political advice: if you are going to make healthcare the centerpiece of your campaign, it is obvious the opposition will question how it is to be financed.

Ergo make sure you pay your campaign healthcare bills.

New York Striptease

Rumor has it Hillary is being approached with the carrot of running for governor of New York to replace scandal plagued Paterson who replaced scandal plagued Spitzer.

Are you kidding me? Replacing scandal plagued anyone with the Clintons?

Bill has been on his best behavior for a chance to return to Pennsylvania Avenue, scene of his favorite debaucheries. No place like the Oval Office for cigars and interns. But then, there’s the possibility Spitzer left his little black book in the governor’s mansion, a prospect I’m sure whoever was crazy enough to think this was a good idea didn’t fail to mention. Not around Hillary, of course.

Now if he can only figure out how to get the key to the chastity belt out of her pu…rse.

The Real Endgame

I’ve been wondering how long it would take before what I perceive to be the real Clinton strategy became part of the public dialog:

Could the veep talk be a red herring? A ploy designed to distract attention from the Clintons’ real endgame?

Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Hillary or Nobody? - Maureen Dowd - New York Times

I thought this was obvious once the Clinton/McCain lovefest began.  Staying in the race long after there is any realistic probability of securing the nomination makes perfect sense.  If the superdelegates are gullible enough to buy into her campaign, she wins.  If Obama stumbles, she wins.  And if Obama loses to McCain, she won’t have to worry about the phenom in four years. Obama will be thrown on the dung heap of failed Democratic candidacies.

Nor will she have much to worry from McCain.  If age doesn’t subdue him, the economy will; if not the economy, the war.  Whoever the next president is will face challenges for which there is only one fix: time.

And so cooling her heels for another four years may not seem such a bad proposition.  By then the economy will do what the economy does: rebound.  The Iraq War will be obviously won or obviously lost; in any case Hillary’s vote for war will no longer be a significant issue.  And the 2008 election?

Just a bad nightmare.  Another debacle for the Democrats as a wimpy, idealistic liberal gets tarred and feathered by the swift boating Republican attack machine.  He just wasn’t tough enough to stand up to them.  And the Clintons didn’t tear the party apart: they were trying to warn them.

In the meantime the Clinton’s will do some cleaning up of their Democratic party.  The long knives will come out.  The Judases will be hanging.  Nancy Pelosi will find herself right back in a minority role.  God help Howard Dean.

Now we know what was behind the smile when Hillary leaned back and gave what many misinterpreted to be her valedictory:  “We’ll be fine”.

I, Human

Hillary attempted to dismiss all the sniping at the lack of actual sniping on her trip to Bosnia with the claim she’s human.

What is humorous to consider is all the hours Hillary and her advisors spent crafting her response to the Bosnian fish story, meticulously calculating the words and tone to defuse the criticism:

“I know, I know: say you’re human.”

“Yeah, that’s the ticket.  Say you’re human.”

“I like that!  Try it.”

Hillary:  “I’m human, stupid”.

“No, no, its not the economy.  Make it a little softer.”

Hillary:  “OK, so sue me.  I’m human.”

“Drop the lawyer bit.  Our focus groups show lawyers have high negatives.”

Hillary:  “OK, OK, how’s this:  I’m human.”  [Shedding a tear]

“Close, but the primary isn’t tomorrow.  We’ve got to save the waterworks until we really need it.”

Despite the irony of Hillary robotically delivering a line about being human, she couldn’t resist taking a snide swipe at her detractors who might find it difficult to believe that she really was human. 

Human, all too human.

The Race Canard

Let me start by confessing I am a great admirer of Barack Obama. We have not seen a politician of his skill in a generation. I will be neither disappointed nor concerned if I wake up on January 20^th of next year and realize he is in command. The campaign he has run has convinced me he is not only capable, but arguably the best qualified person to run the country. POTUS is, after all, a politician, indeed more the politician-in-chief than the commander-in-chief, and Obama has shown himself to be a consummate politician, if for no other reason than the fact he has managed the illusion he is other than a politician.

Unfortunately for any politician is the fundamental question we want answered of a presidential candidate is: who are you, really? That is the reason retail politics, shaking hands and kissing babies, is still requisite to getting elected. We want to look them in the eye. We want to know who they are. Or at least we want to believe we know who they are.

This is the core of the controversy about Barack’s pastor. One is known by the company he keeps, a proverb ignored at peril by any politician. Obama was fully aware of this which is why he decided not to have the Rev. Wright give the invocation at his campaign kickoff event. The only real surprise is the Obama campaign was so unprepared for the issue when it finally exploded. His initial claims to ignorance of Wright’s extremism surely defies credulity, and fraught with the risk of exposure, which is why he had to back off the claim in what has become known as “The Speech”.

Don’t misunderstand me: The Speech was marvelous. None of us has ever heard anything quite like it. Obama is easily the most gifted orator since Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Speech is something that will be studied for many years to come. It is also an important and significant milestone in race relations.

The Speech was also a canard.

Worse, it is a variation of the race card. The real issue was masked beneath this important speech on race, whereas the real issue has nothing to do with race. You don’t need to resolve, or even make progress on, the race issue to account for why Obama would associate with a man who uses his pulpit to spew hate and lies. The fact that the man has suffered racial injustice is irrelevant. Indeed, one of the most irrational things one can do is try to explain away “why” the irrational are irrational. Talking about race has only one merit: it buries a relatively small, inexplicable issue in a overwhelmingly large, inexplicable issue.

When the situation first broke black Obama supporters making the case that white America could not understand or appreciate the goings on in a black congregation. I recognized that this was risking all that Obama had worked so diligently and so nobly to avoid: being “the black candidate”. Because all of a sudden here is an issue, and it is a “black thing”. Rev. Wright managed to do what Hillary, who as he notes “ain’t never been called a nigger”, couldn’t seem to pull off despite all her machinations: slap the black on Barack. And Obama played the race card himself by conveniently making the issue of his association with Wright about race.

The problem is this solution only buys time, ironically a political lesson the Clintons are infamous for. It gets him, perhaps, to the nomination, after which you can rest assured you will be seeing the Rev. Wright’s Greatest Hits ad nauseum from then until the election (not earlier because I suspect the Republicans have now deduced that Obama is the weaker opponent). And what is Obama going to do? Give speech after speech about race? The networks won’t cover it again and again, and all that will remain is Rev. Wright’s snarling face screaming “God Damn America”, over and over again courtesy 527 paid advertising and conservative talk shows.

Hillary now has her unelectability argument, but it is one she can only press by turning the race card Obama played, something she cannot do with alienating Obama youth, the black community and the liberal wing of the Democratic party. It’s a dirty job, but if anyone will do it the Clintons will.

It is a shame. It really was a great speech.

Getting Depressed

These days, as the vortex of the subprime scam threatens to swallow market after market, references to the Great Depression are becoming increasingly commonplace:

You have to go back to the banking crisis of the Great Depression to find a moment when the financial system as a whole seemed so close to the precipice.

Bear Stearns Exposed - Telegraph

There was another reference no so long ago to the Great Depression:

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The biggest change in the nation’s banking system since the Great Depression became law Friday, when President Bill Clinton signed a measure overhauling federal rules governing the way financial institutions operate. . . .

Congress passed the bipartisan measure November 5 [1999], opening the way for a blossoming of financial “supermarkets” selling loans, investments and insurance. Proponents had pushed the legislation in Congress for two decades, and Wall Street and the banking and insurance industries had poured millions of dollars into lobbying for it in the past few years.

Clinton signs banking overhaul measure - CNN

Deregulation paved the way for the creative packaging of risky loans into financial instruments that are the cause of the subprime mess.

Blame Bush for the economy if you want, but it wasn’t his signature on that bill.  Still want a Clinton in the White House?

Bunny Ranch Rules

Politics may make strange bedfellows, but the uproar over the governor of New York Eliot Spitzer’s disgrace is all too familiar. So familiar that the real story may be the fact these things dominate the news. In the middle of a contentious presidential election, while fighting two wars with a tanking economy the story du jour is some idiot pol getting caught with his pants down. Oh well, I needed a break from the news. Recognizing the story was going to dominate the news cycle, I turned off the television and caught up on some long overdue reading.

Nothing stokes ratings like a public sex scandal, and the press outdo themselves in expressing disgust while at the same time repeatedly exploiting every salacious detail. For example, one news show included a segment with the proprietor of the infamous Bunny Ranch in Nevada, where prostitution is legal, and one Ms. Kisses, apparently an employee of the establishment. The question: what exactly would you get for the five grand Spitzer was allegedly spending on his consorts. At the conclusion of the segment, as the host was attempting to cut to a commercial, the proprietor of the Bunny Ranch was insistent on getting in this point: that it was shameful for these men to drag their wives into the public when addressing the issue.

I happen to agree with him, but there seems something rather odd, to the point of being unseemly, for a man who is essentially a pimp to be so concerned for the wife of a john. How many wives have been humiliated by their husband purchasing services from his establishment? Yet he was genuinely outraged by Spitzer’s wife standing by her man. Between this and the hypocrisy of Spitzer, who fervently prosecuted prostitution, I’m quite sure I don’t get it.

Must be the Bunny Ranch Rules.

Machiavelli Be Damned

You have to hand it to the Clintons, they are diabolically clever.  Having realized that the mathematical possibility of winning the nomination outright are nil, they have apparently decided that the cost of the presidency is holding their nose and putting Obama on the ticket: as the vice president.  This stratagem leverages the Democratic throng clamoring for a “Dream Ticket”–with Clinton on top of the ticket, of course.

Never mind that he has won the most delegates and the math favors him.  Obama will be the bad guy if he doesn’t embrace the “compromise” that resolves the party’s conundrum.  This is an exquisite variation of the triangulation the Clintons are infamous for, although I’m sure to Obama right now it feels more like strangulation.

For the Clintons, what does it matter?  With a “two fer”, the vice president is essentially irrelevant to their presidency anyway.  As Maureen Dowd notes:

If he thinks Hillary has cut him down to size lately, he’d better imagine what his life would be like as the Clintons’ vice president

Maureen Dowd, The Monster Mash - New York Times

Machiavelli has nothing on the Clintons.  They didn’t learn from him, he foresaw them.

The irony is it is precisely this sort of political ruthless cleverness that one side believes is absolutely necessary to confront a hostile world, whereas the other side proclaims a better world can be forged.  Which is right?

That is the underlying philosophical question of the election, meaning we will be deciding whether we Americans at the beginning of the millennium believe our cup is half fool or morally empty.