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David Poland

By David Poland poland@moviecitynews.com

The Clinton Syndrome

As things wind down in the Democratic nominating process, I find that I am starting to find room for perspective. The threat of Hillary Clinton and her people changing the rules enough to take the nomination is over. And the answers to the questions of what has happened in recent months start coming into focus.
Of course the details are specific to a very, very unique set of circumstances in this race. But then again… baloney.
The same tortured logic that the Clinton campaign has been selling since losing this race on Super Tuesday remains, albeit in its fourth or fifth incarnation. It’s a logic that isn’t unfamiliar in the annals of human instinct. It’s the logic of bringing down your adversary even when you know you can’t win by any normal methodology.
The problem with “Hilary’s gutsy run” is not that she doesn’t deserve to remain in a race that was always close. The problem is not that she is, like Huckabee was, so far out that her continuing effort was nothing but a stunt. The problem is that in order to compete against someone who is in front of you in a race and who cannot be passed by your speeding up, only by their slowing down, you not only have to keep up the speed you have, but you must find a way to drag the leader backwards.
Clinton & Co have effective been running from behind for months, close enough to kick dirt on the back of Obama’s calves every yard of the way, but never close enough to pass him without his stumbling. The goal has not been to win – except by massive fluke – but to keep Obama from achieving, metaphorically, a world record speed. After all, second best is second best, even if the second-place runner’s time would have been a world record if they had won.
I believe that Obama will survive and ultimately thrive on the attacks of the Clinton campaign. But there is reason to be concerned about it. In an era with a more old-fashioned news cycle and none of the endless coverage via TV and the web that seems so out of control and repetitive at times, Clinton would have won this race by dint of the power of party insiders. There is no chance that Obama, faced with the same numbers as Clinton had coming out of Super Tuesday, would still be in the race. He would have actually been forced out. He would never have been allowed these months of hubris and rage by party leadership.
Simply, in order to “keep hope alive,” Clinton has been forced to run a relentlessly negative campaign against the Obama candidacy, turning issues of what would normally (and would have been for her) private strategy into public smears.
Obama voters are not pro-Obama so much as anti-Clinton… and for some unearned reason, not in response to Clinton’s actions in the campaign.
Older voters prefer to vote for someone they have known for a long time than some inexperienced kid.
The media is in the bag for Obama… Clinton is a victim of their bias.
Obama can’t win… or now, alternatively, he is just an inferior candidate.
By sticking with party rules, Obama is trying to take the nomination away from Clinton.

The problem is not that some or all of these things (except the last one) are not in some small ways true. But these things are the surface text, not the recurring and relentless subtext that is so nasty.
If a voter cannot be pro-Obama without it being about anti-Clinton, then the subtext is that there is no real pro-Obama argument. And the ongoing nastiness of claiming that Obama’s support is based on fairy tales and misogyny and a lack of understanding of core values is destructive to the Party in no small way because Clinton and Obama are so close on policy.
There is no question that older, more traditional voters are change-averse, even if they are worn out by the current administration. If there was any great lesson in Bush’s second win, it was that people will cling to the devil they know against all logic. Clinton’s winning run since Super Tuesday has been based on a clear knowledge of that. Not only did they enjoy a massive advantage in uncontested primaries in Florida and Michigan – where they may have still won, but which Obama had the money to contest in a real way, and which Ohio and Pennsylvania history shows us would likely have cut the margins in half of more – but the whole rough-and-tumble Clinton schtick manipulated these people powerfully.
The Pew Research/Harvard media study about media bias in this race, which clearly shows less pro-Obama bias than pro-Clinton bias can’t read the stories that were not done. How does a candidate who paid more in taxes last year than most of the PA/OH/KY/WV constituencies she “feels the pain of” will earn in combined family income over the next decade… who is Ivy League educated… who enjoys the status of carrying the most powerful name in the Democratic Party in the last two decades… who is the machine candidate… how does her campaign turn the opponent who was raised by a single mother, just paid off his student loans, is Black, carries an ethnic name, and who has built a candidacy on a base of national private support with average donations of less than $200 per supporter into the elitist? By the silent acquiescence of the media.
The logic that Obama can’t win simply boggles the mind… especially in light of Clinton’s “gender is the hardest glass ceiling” rhetoric. Here is the obvious question… if gender is the toughest glass ceiling, tougher than race, then how could Clinton be a better general election candidate than Obama?
And if Obama can’t win the general, how did he win the primaries?
But this is the Clinton specialty… playing the victim publicly while being in control of the situation privately.
Of course the women who are most rabid about the Clinton candidacy are enraged. They have been told to be enraged by Clinton over and over and over again. They have had the opportunity to imagine one of theirs in the White House, which is not much less revolutionary than having a Black Man in the White House. They were the front-runner. The general election was the challenge. The nomination was assured. And now they are being told, “No… it’s not happening. You couldn’t even beat the first-term Senator with the funny name and the rhetoric so compelling that it makes you anxious about believing.” And then, the Clinton team has said, for months now, we’re having this taken from us… Obama’s not far enough ahead to really win legitimately… we’re still in it… switching to the “other side” is a betrayal.
The problem is that the “other side” is still a Democrat who is 90% in agreement with Clinton.
You don’t have to be a bad or dumb person to be swayed by the emotionality of all of this. But you are being lied to and manipulated. And like any great lie, there is enough truth to keep it alive. Clinton is within striking distance… but not close enough to win by any legitimate count… and she hasn’t been since Super Tuesday.
Since Super Tuesday, Clinton has run an anti-Obama, anti-New campaign that has resonated in states where there is a lot of room for it. In the meanwhile, Obama undercut the power of this in the most significant states – by Clinton’s reckoning – taking more delegates in Texas and cutting Clinton’s lead in Ohio and Pennsylvania in half over weeks of campaigning. That’s when Clinton started the “he can’t close” argument. Wherever the bar lands, keep moving that bar.
And has there been a scarier line in this campaign than Geraldine “I Once Seemed Worthy Of Respect” Ferraro’s, “It’s not racism that is driving them, it’s racial resentment”? Can you parse an “ism” any more profoundly than that? And this comes from a person who broke ground for feminists in a real way.
What is more horrifying to pull out of the bag of racial fear than “reverse racism?” Does Ferraro believe that the less-privileged core of America will be left behind by The Black Man? If not, she is stirring racism with real hate speech. If so, she is, simply, out of her mind, avoiding his policy arguments which are so close to those of the candidate she supports. Either way, is there any way to support an argument of White American Families earning under $100,000 as victims of Barack Obama?
Can you imagine anyone saying, with a straight face, “It’s not sexism that’s driving them, it’s sexual resentment”? Where do we think racism and sexism come from? Good logic? Or is it, as it always has been, from a base of fear, ignorance, and resentment? Are we really discussing whether, “That bitch took my job” is better or worse than, “That nigger took my job”?
It gets worse, the more context you get from Ferraro. “It’s not racism that is driving them, it’s racial resentment. And that is enforced because they don’t believe he understands them and their problems.” But the woman who has been in Washington for decades now and who has $50 million in the bank and who was educated in much the same way “He” was? She has spent months telling “them” that “He” doesn’t understand their and their problems.
And that has been the horror of this ongoing campaign. It is hard to unring a bell. I believe that most people who called for Clinton to get out before the six week slog to Pennsylvania wanted this not because they hate Hillary or because they were misogynists or because they couldn’t see past their Barack-colored glasses, but because they knew, logically and instinctively, that this was a problem that was about to be created. Of course there was already resistance to the new and racism and we-don’t-know-him-ism and even some real dislike of Obama in these states and cultures. But we didn’t have a force using tens of millions of dollars and mighty rhetoric and anger to galvanize them and to tell them that they were right to be afraid, right to hate him, right to resent him, and would be better off with a Republican than Barack Hussein Obama.
And The Clinton Campaign is still stoking that fire of resentment. Florida gets seated by a unanimous vote – including Ickes – and Michigan gets seated in the way suggested by the same state Democrats who decided to break party rules and to hold an un-legal election, not the way The Obama Campaign suggested, and still the Clinton Campaign comes out screaming bloody murder over 4 elected delegates… as though Obama stole them or had the power to do so.
And once again, we are looking at a DNC Rules Committee that, going in, was seen as being populated by a majority of Clinton supporters. Clinton’s campaign went in with the advantage. And they got more, many would argue, than they deserved… which is to say, counting the Michigan vote at all.
But again, the core problem is not the outcome of that procedure, but the tone of anger and “we wuz robbed” that has been coming out of the Clinton campaign since they fell hopeless behind in this election, months ago. They aren’t stoking the positive argument, but continue to undermine Obama every single day.
There is little doubt that Clinton is a tougher adversary than McCain for Obama this year, given that there are real issues between the Democratic and Republican candidates that lean heavily for the Democrat at the moment. The choice between Clinton and Obama has been, from the start, about minutiae and personality more than any real differences. Even the experience issue is a bit silly, given that The First Lady is not an elected or appointed political office. So taking sides meant a commitment. And no one likes to be spurned once they’ve made a commitment. And when one side stokes the idea that the other side hates their side… well, this is where we are.
Simply put, a Clinton supporter who would suggest for one moment that they would vote for McCain over Obama never could be supporting Clinton based on policy. If you believed in Clinton’s policy arguments, the leap to McCain instead of Obama is so distant that you could NEVER make an argument on that level… only on the anger that has been stirred by the Clinton campaign.
This has been made even clearer by McCain’s abandonment of many of his truly independent ideas in order to placate the right win of his party. Reproductive Choice, Health Care, Iraq. Can’t get any more basic than that.
If you really believe in any of the principles espoused by the Democratic Party and you are still saying you will vote for McCain over Obama, then you are either an idiot, a willful liar, or a victim of Stockholm Syndrome via the Clinton campaign.
I believe that Democrats will snap out of the Syndrome and sadly, not only vote for Obama, by really hate Hillary Clinton in time. Like reformed smokers, once people have been manipulated to this profoundly and survive and get clear, they tend to go too far to the other side.
I was never much of a fan of The Clinton Legacy… but even I see this as sad.
But this is a country in which people took massive loans they knew they couldn’t afford to maintain without an ongoing pyramid scheme, whether in 1929 or 1999 or 2007, and who damaged the economy for all the rest of us, and who we now show sympathy towards. We want to believe. We want to forgive. We want to live our illusions.
And on we go… to heaven… or oblivion… or some other undiscovered country…

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4 Responses to “The Clinton Syndrome”

  1. Mr. Muckle says:

    Brilliant. Kudos.

  2. repeatfather says:

    I almost entirely agree with your critique of Clinton; her campaign has come to represent everything that’s wrong with our political process.
    However, I do think her argument that Barack might not be a strong general election candidate is not unreasonable. I haven’t done the math, but I’m pretty sure if the Democratic nomination process had gone to a winner-takes-all model of distributing delegates (as the Republicans do), Clinton would have surely pummeled him rather quickly. And she HAS pummeled him in a number of states.
    I don’t think our country has learned a whole about racism or misogyny through this historic nomination process. The only thing we’ve learned is the method of naming presidential nominees is unbelievably retarded and inane, and needs to be reformed.

  3. Rob says:

    Huckabee said it best: “If the Democratic nomination process were like the Republican nominating process, Clinton would have clinched it long ago. And if the Republican nominating process were like the Democratic nominating process, I’d be the nominee.”

  4. messiahcomplexio says:

    good work dave

Quote Unquotesee all »

It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon