the technologist

The Clintons wield power and positioning just as fervently and ruthlessly as their Republican White House predecessors. Where they differ, Bush and Co. used power to change the country, whereas the Clintons, more benevolently yet more narcissistically, use power to win elections. 

Democrats in South Carolina mandated a significant, cross-racial and loud rebuke of Clintonism. 

Hillary’s emotional moment in New Hampshire seems ludicrous when compared to how nasty the Democratic contest has grown. While Hillary fundraised in Florida and California, Bill was left to stump for Hillary in South Carolina. 

The Clinton camp returned to form by rising above and between race and gender issues. It’s called “triangulation” and recently it’s been easier to count than explain. 

The Clintons saw an opening to pander to the MoveOn.org-wing of the party and they took it. (1) Obama has been taken to task for his praise of Ronald Reagan. (Most historians and independent experts will tell you that Obama was right). And even Bill praised Reagan’s ideas– most famously in his 1996 State of the Union address when he announced, “the era of big government is over.”

(2) The Clintons have cherry-picked Obama’s quotes to cast doubt on his now-famous judgment of the Iraq war. Bill wrote it off as a “fairy tale.” Other negative ads were pulled when Senator Ed Kennedy and former Clinton aide and Illinois Congressman Rahm Emmanuel intervened to prevent a Democratic implosion.

The Clintons reveal their true motivations in their innocuousness. Hillary was “getting warmed up” at the most recent Democratic debate when she accused (3) Obama of defending a Chicago “slum landlord.” (Clinton could not call out Obama for a disavowed, but sketchy land deal with Rezko, because then she’d be an outright hypocrite. See: Whitewater).

Obama was again mocked (4) for saying that the president is not “an operating officer. Some…think the job of the president is to go in and run some bureaucracy. My job is to set a vision of ‘here’s where the bureaucracy needs to go.’”

Hillary’s surrogates hyped her readiness on “day one” to be a “hands-on” commander-in-chief. But a few days later, Bill effectively agreed with Obama when he said that as president, “You don’t run the bureaucracy, but you are responsible for seeing that your ideas are turned into positive changes in other people’s lives.”

And just like that, her campaign may have overreached and over-triangulated itself into a box, and alienated many in the process.

As the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd said so succinctly, “It’s odd that the first woman with a shot at becoming president is so openly dependent on her husband to drag her over the finish line. She handed over South Carolina to him, knowing that her support here is largely derivative.”

And then on Saturday afternoon (5) Bill naively brought up race in dismissing Obama’s South Carolina triumph by praising, but linking it to Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 wins there. Jackson was successful only in Southern primaries in 1984 and 1988, and largely when Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis had respectively sealed the nominations. 

The Clinton campaign has over the last few weeks consistently denied intentional effort to stir race into the South Carolina primary. (6)Yet in the same breath their statement brands Obama as “the black candidate.”

With the sentimental card played in New Hampshire, the pugnacious in Nevada and now the abrasive and borderline (if not outright) race card in South Carolina, one has to wait to see what new deck Clintonism will rig before Feb. 5.

Stumble it!

~ by maxzimbert on February 5, 2008.