On the face of things, Hillary Clinton should be just one of countless failed politicians, either working for a lobbying firm that could exploit her network of contacts or running some foundation and speechifying for six figures to true believers. Yet we are bombarded with stories about people fawning over her, trumpeting her as the next president, extolling her virtues and telling us how she’s among the smartest and most capable women in the world.
In the context of her history, my reaction to this phenomenon ranges from puzzling to infuriating. Lets consider her track record.
There was Bill Clinton and the 1992 campaign, where he told the nation that we’d be getting “two for the price of one” if we elected him, and once ensconced in the Oval Office he set Hillary to working on health care reform. “Hillarycare” proved so unpopular that even with the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, it failed to pass. Worse, it was one of the hot-button issues that enabled the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. That’s a mighty big piece of baggage.
There was Bill’s infidelity with Gennifer Flowers prior to winning the Presidency that Hillary publicly forgave. Later, there was the Monica Lewinsky affair, which Hillary attempted to scapegoat the Right with her “vast right-wing conspiracy” accusation. This a decade after the Flowers story and as we now know her full knowledge of other infidelities and Bill’s almost pathological womanizing. Despite all this, she had the chutzpah to denigrate Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man.” What are we to think of her in the light of all this other than she places political aspirations above any sense of self-respect or personal moral code?
After the 1994 debacle, Bill leveraged the adoration of the press and his personal charisma to transform his public persona from full-blown statist liberal to a triangulator who grabbed the best ideas of the GOP and took credit for them as his own. Hillary went along for the ride, coat-tailing Bill’s popularity despite having her duties after HillaryCare scaled back to stuff more typical for First Ladies. She did travel quite a bit in support of diplomatic efforts and was effective in participating in the enactment of several significant government programs, but these are resume bullets, not demonstrations of unique-in-the-universe talent and capability.
There was Whitewater. There was Travelgate. There was Filegate. Hillary navigated through these unscathed, though rumors still abound that many ran interference for her through all this. With the help of the press, she was portrayed as a victim and a sympathetic figure, which is absurd given that she was the wife of the most powerful man in the world and already dubbed a mighty force herself
Her record as Senator was acceptable but not epic. She brought home some pork, voted for the wars and the Patriot Act, voted party-line against the Bush tax cuts and his judicial nominations and for various statist initiatives. As Secretary of State, she headed up what can only be described as Obama’s aimless, contradictory and amateurish foreign policy, and left that position with little to show for 4 years of traveling around the world. She’s not a style icon, nor a public speaker of any note (more Mars Attacks than Barack Obama).
Without belaboring the point, her track record is substantial but not exceptional. It’s an impressive curriculum vitae – Yale Law School, attorney, law school professor, wife of the Arkansas Attorney General, wife of the Arkansas Governor, wife of the President of the United States, junior senator from NY, (failed) primary run for President, Secretary of State. She’s obviously talented in many ways and skilled in politics, and has a memorable place in history. But, does her record explain the hagiographic treatment? The admiration bordering on idolatry? The notion that she’d be a remarkable President? In a word, no.
What explanation can we find for Hillary-worship, if track record doesn’t explain it? I believe it’s rooted in a combination of tribalism and revisionist nostalgia. We know that the majority of voters in this nation reflexively identify with “their” party and many quite literally hate the other party. We also know that many people consider the Clinton years glorious, a grand time when the guiding hand of Bill Clinton made everything kumbaya and soft bunnies, and that the only thing the wretched Republicans did during those years was a witch hunt that resulted in the Lewinsky scandal. The reality that Clinton benefited from an adoring press, a Republican Congress that wrote “his” (purportedly but not really) balanced budget and forced his hand on many issues, a dot-com bubble that drove tax revenues to record levels and a personality that turned him teflon to a laundry list of scandals is unpleasant for liberals to contemplate, and so they choose to view those years as Camelot 2.0. The Left also chooses to ignore how centrist and compromising Clinton’s final 6 years were, both in comparison to his first two and to Obama’s tenure to date. Hillary is merely benefiting by association.
Hillary also has a long enough and diverse enough public service resume to enable cherry picking. In a short attention span world, if you can rattle off positive accomplishments for a minute or 2, most people will tune out any rebuttals. Yet the rebuttals are myriad. The tolerance of serial philandering, the epic failure of Hillarycare, the list of shady dealings, an unremarkable Senate term, and who can forget the the 3 AM political ad in the light of Benghazi?
The Left can, apparently. We shouldn’t be surprised, though, the Left is driven by and impressed by intent rather than accomplishment and shiny ornaments rather than dull but effective workings. Statism thrives on big personalities and famous names – statists want impressive, charismatic leaders to be in charge of everything. Therein lies the reason for Obama’s election and re-election, and therein lies the reason for continued Hillary-worship. And, lest we forget, the Left is just dying to make a woman President, because they’ll have a collective stroke if the first female president comes from the GOP.
That last conclusion is supported by the recent buzz involving Elizabeth Warren, recently minted as the junior Senator from Massachusetts (D), and infamous for her dubious claims of Native American heritage. Senator Warren’s public record portrays her as more liberal than Hillary, and all the factors regarding statists and hero worship that I touched on above are just as applicable to the nascent Warren-for-President movement. Perhaps, then, Hillary Worship is rooted in a paucity of other pedigreed and demographically proper candidates, a void that needs to be filled. If so, she may find her path to the Democratic nomination in 2016 unexpectedly derailed, just as it was in 2008.
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