Breaking a Promise; Talkin' Hillary

I realize now that my promise to avoid writing about the maneuverings of presidential candidates until closer to the 2008 election will be impossible to keep. In general, though, I’m an honest guy. Really. Don’t start mistrusting me left and right because of this. I’d hate for that to happen.

Two Sundays ago, The New York Times Magazine ran a piece by Matt Bai discussing the Democratic hopefuls, and whether anyone will gather the steam necessary to knock Hillary Clinton off the top of the ticket. Bai used Mark Warner, governor of Virginia, as his primary case study.

I had a few reactions to the article:

1. The New York Times not only doesn’t want Mark Warner to be the Democratic candidate in 2008, it might hate him on a personal level. It might want him deported to Gitmo. Warner may have done something inexcusable to every staffer of the Times, even every member of each staffer’s nuclear -- no, extended family. I say this because Mark Warner is, if a little goofy, an average looking person. But the portrait the paper chose for the cover of the magazine (which I can’t find online, unfortunately) makes him look not only like the love child of the most dishonest real estate agent in history and a talking donkey, but a donkey-agent about to uncork a cringe-inducing pickup line in your general direction. Looking at this picture, I don’t just want to keep him off the presidential ticket; I want to keep him at least 300 yards away from any children I might have one day. And this seems unfair, because it really appears that the Times must have digitally made him creepier (the paper has already admitted to altering the color scheme of his shirt and blazer from blue to a hideous pink and purple).

2. Democrats are idiotic. I can say this because I’m proudly listed as an independent voter.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The party’s insiders, expecting Clinton to be a virtually unstoppable force, seem to be falling in line behind her, which means there will be only so much additional money and organization left over for those who would challenge her. But more than anything, Democrats will tell you that they are desperate to win next time around, and a lot of pragmatic activists and voters worry that Clinton is simply too divisive a candidate to take back the White House. (In a Gallup poll in January, 51 percent of respondents said they would definitely not vote for her.)

Which leads me to wonder what part of “definitely not” Democrats don’t understand. I mean, we’re at a simple majority of 51 percent here before you even broach the subject of “maybe not” or “we’ll see how I feel after breakfast that day.”

3. (Following directly from #2.) The Democrats are going to lose the next presidential election.

That is, unless the Republicans somehow get together and decide to nominate Jacques Chirac. Here’s the article again:

Clinton encounters ambivalence online because she is a fixture of official Washington, and because she continues to emphasize her cooperation with like-minded Republicans. The party’s online activists don’t want to hear about the compromises it takes to govern; they want someone who will derail the Republican agenda, even if he (or she) has to strap himself to the tracks with two fistfuls of dynamite to do it.

So, the Democrats are split into two camps, as far as I can see: One is the party insiders, who will back Clinton just for the satisfaction of being on the winning team within the party, even if it means not winning the big prize. The other is a clear minority in this country, composed of people who want dynamite-strapped true believers to derail the Republicans, even though no one with that platform would be allowed to enter the larger D.C. area, much less the actual White House.

This is a fairly conservative country, and I don’t even mean that it’s populated mostly by foaming-at-the-mouth Bible-beaters -- I really don’t think it is. They exist, of course, the foamers, but there’s also a vast expanse of centrist people. They are damned hard to please, though, and no one proves that more than Hillary's hubby. In 1992, Bill Clinton won 43% of the popular vote. In 1996, as an incumbent in peacetime, without Monicagate on the public radar, with unprecedented wealth and happiness reigning from sea to shining sea, and running against an uninspired Bob Dole and a dangerously unmedicated Ross Perot, Clinton, a man who’s been praised as the most brilliant natural political talent we’ve ever seen, a centrist from a Southern state, won 49.2% of the vote. Not even half. Against Dole. And Perot.

Now we have Hillary, a smart, successful, hardworking candidate, who 51% of the country would never vote for. Ever. She’s a stiffer public speaker than Bill. She brings almost all of his negative baggage onto the flight with her, and less than all of his gifts.

4. Please, let’s not make this about feminism.

To the article, once more:

It is a perilous mission that Warner and other Democratic hopefuls undertake as they try to cast doubts about (Clinton’s) electability without appearing to attack one of the party’s iconic figures. And it’s risky not just because she is a Clinton, beloved by most of the party’s important interest groups, but also because she is a woman; a lot of voters may wonder if a woman can really be elected president, but they would most likely turn on any male candidate who was crass enough to imply as much.

Reducing this to the electability of a woman is nonsense. It’s like arguing (not quite, of course, but go with me) that the country isn’t ready to elect a black president because Al Sharpton isn’t in the White House yet. I suppose it’s possible that we’re not ready to elect a black president, and that would be sad, but the fact that we’re not ready to elect Al Sharpton is only a sign of collective mental health.

And finally:

5. Democrats are idiotic.

Forgive the repetition. But in the fall of 2000, I was working without pay for a literary-political magazine in New York. As the presidential election neared, a dry-erase board went up in a hallway, and all of the magazine’s staffers wrote down their choice for president. About a dozen people volunteered their preference, all of them writing “Ralph Nader.” These were very well-educated, widely read, socially concerned people, and somehow they had convinced themselves that the necessary response to Clinton’s eight years of success was not the election of his tag-team partner, but of Ralph Nader, a man whose major qualification seemed to be that he once hectored a bunch of us into wearing seat belts more often. They were, in short, insane. (Of course, I’ve come to learn in my ensuing years around these parts that they were likely just participating in a perverse level of self-definition with this vote, like youngish, smart New Yorkers do whenever they self-sabotage an election or buy one cheap beer over another or talk with incredible contempt about something they had enthusiasm for seven minutes ago.) The point is, Bush won, and being in NY and at the headquarters of said magazine, I know how deeply this pissed people off. The benefit of this, of course, was that by the time 2004 rolled around, liberals were willing to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, there was more of a difference between Dems and Reps than ol’ Ralphy Boy had wanted us to believe. (The fact that they would have nodded along with Ralphy Boy on this point in the first place boggles the mind, and is reason #3,988 that I’ve vowed to never officially join the lefty ranks.)

Now it’s almost time for the 2008 frenzy. Bush’s second term is widely regarded as a disaster, and it’s not even close to half over. If there’s a lesson in what will be the past eight years by the time we vote for prez again, it’s twofold: The Republicans know how to win this thing, even when the chips are down; and “electable” means something different for the Democrats than it does for the Republicans. The party’s got to figure out just what that means, but I’m pretty sure it’s not Hillary Clinton.