Hillary's Idea of Fun
Or, how the once favored candidate resembles the most loathed girl on campus
About 20 minutes into Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential debate in Ohio, I finally noticed – perhaps more slowly than the rest of you, perhaps more slowly than the voters in Ohio and Texas – the “tell” Hillary Clinton offers whenever she feels uncomfortable or is peddling a line for strictly political purposes.
She smiles. Or even laughs. If she’s talking, her eyes have a tendency to avoid the camera. Her lids droop slightly.
About 40 minutes into the debate, I noticed what might be described as the converse phenomenon: that this woman really doesn’t have a sense of humor. And if she thinks something is funny, or “fun,” as she sometimes puts it, it is pretty reliably a signal to the rest of us that something distasteful or outright disgusting is afoot.
I mention this not because I think it is important or even particularly interesting to psychoanalyze Clinton’s personality, but because I want to try to understand why a woman this self-assured, this manifestly competent in many ways, this ferocious at defending her corner and putting her passions on the line, is at the same time hurtling toward political self-destruction at warp speed.
She had that killer smile on her face at the very beginning of the debate, when Tim Russert and Brian Williams showed the tape of her “Shame on you, Barack Obama” campaign speech of a few days earlier. And she had it again, midway through the debate, when they showed footage of her other most recent attack-dog speech, the one where she mocked Obama’s rhetorical style and talked about the sky opening and the light coming down and the celestial choirs singing.
That second time, in fact, she burst into nervous titters as soon as Obama started reacting. She was positively howling with laughter when, instead of taking offense, he said she showed some good humor and deserved “points for delivery.” Obama’s answer was, from her standpoint, no laughing matter: He managed to appear supremely gracious while at the same time showing her up in all her ambition-driven unscrupulousness.
Then came the coup de grace, as she herself sought to explain away the incident. “Well, I was having a little fun,” she told the moderators. “You know, it’s hard to find time to have fun on the campaign trail, but occasionally you can sneak that in.”
Clearly, Clinton’s idea of fun is nothing short of ripping out her opponent’s throat – she certainly hasn’t shown much propensity to having fun any other way this campaign season, unless she’s been turfing disabled supporters out of their wheelchairs or kicking little girls to the ground when the press corps hasn’t been looking.
Equally clearly, her idea of a really bad time is when the throat-ripping doesn’t work and she watches her poll numbers sink ever lower. Almost in tandem with her uncomfortably raucous laughter, she demonstrated some nasty flashes of distinctly ill humor. One of them has already been much written about – when she cited Saturday Night Live to suggest the media was out to get her, and wondered if Obama might need “another pillow” to make him more comfortable. But there was another one, arguably even nastier, when Russert grilled her on whether – and when – she and her husband might release their tax returns as they have promised.
“I will do it as others have done it,” she said, every pore in her body seemingly oozing insincerity. “Upon becoming the nominee, or even earlier, Tim, because I have been as open as I can be.”
Russert didn’t let up, and wondered if that meant she’d release the returns before Election Day in Texas and Ohio. Suddenly, her inner harpy flew out. “I’m a little busy right now,” she said sarcastically. “I hardly have time to sleep.”
Even if she hoped the line would sound cute, its delivery made its meaning crystal-clear: I’ll make my own timetable, thank you very much, and don’t presume to tell me otherwise in the name of democracy, openness, or any other pompous concept you care to throw at me. Imperious? I’d say so. Unelectable? Very possibly.
And so the final curtain dropped a little lower on one of the most extraordinary pieces of American political theatre in modern times – the disintegration of a presidential candidate who, just a few months ago, seemed well-nigh unassailable, both within her party and in the country at large.
Clinton had the party establishment on her side. The electoral calendar played strongly in her favor, with its (deliberately) front-loaded torrent of primaries and caucuses on Tsunami Tuesday that, by their very nature, excluded all but the most prominent and lavishly funded of candidates. She had experience and name recognition galore, not to mention an enduringly popular legacy and a reliably electric fellow campaigner in the shape of her husband.
And yet it all fell apart, thanks to Obama’s ability to achieve instant rock-star status, mobilize a vast grassroots operation, and sell the public on the idea that we need to move beyond the divisive partisan dogfights of the 1990s and the Bush years, and refashion American politics from the ground up. People have talked about Clinton’s likeability, about her polarizing effect on the electorate, about the souring effect of having held and, to some degree, abused power in the past.
All these are valid issues, but now, as we reach the endgame, I think it is ultimately about authenticity. The voters who really matter in next Tuesday’s contests, the ones who still have a propensity to change their minds, are not the voters who have examined the two candidates’ policy platforms, or analyzed their campaigning styles, or done extensive research on Obama’s state senate career in Illinois vis-à-vis Hillary’s public pronouncements on health care, or NAFTA, or the war in Iraq.
Those voters already know which way they are going. The undecideds are people who tend to be much more disengaged, who will go in the end with their gut feeling – a feeling based not on substance so much as a blink. Who can they trust? Who is more comfortable in his or her own skin?
On that score, Obama wins hands down. He was far from perfect in Tuesday’s debate. Clinton and the moderators landed some zingers on him, to be sure – his failure as chairman of a Senate oversight committee to hold substantive hearings on the issues he is now pressing on the campaign trail, or his apparent wavering on his commitment to public financing of the general election.
The big difference between him and Clinton, though, was in the way he answered these points. Yes, he acknowledged happily, I haven’t held hearings, but that’s because I’ve been running for president since getting that chairmanship at the beginning of last year. No, I haven’t waffled on public financing, he insisted, but I intend to talk it over with the McCain campaign as and when I become the nominee so the playing field is fair for everyone. One can find plenty to criticize in these answers, but the point is he answered them easily, happily, like someone who doesn’t mind taking a knock or two because he has his eye on the bigger picture.
Clinton, by contrast, had her nervous laughter and her flashes of anger. Ouch. Sure, she’s hard-working and ambitious and out to show everyone what a fighter she is. But we all knew people like that in high school, and our experience tells us they induce fear and loathing long before they inspire admiration. Clinton wants to be top of the class, the ultimate valedictorian, but as it all falls apart she’s in danger of becoming the most widely-loathed girl in school.
Published: 02/27/2008
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