The Clintons, The Times Endorsement, and Turning Pages

Many kind tribespeople have encouraged me to reprint a comment I appended last night to Kid Oakland's diary "Hmm" (which I also recommend, as I always seem to do with KOs work).  It was set off by today's peculiar and tellingly timed endorsement of Hillary Clinton by the New York Times, which instantly transported me to the 1990s, and back again to the present with a new clarity of vision.

So, here goes...  See you at the polls!

I think this Thursday evening, as the polls align, that Team Clinton sees 3rd place as a distinct possibility in SC, and that this would be catastrophic for them.  The unavoidable meme emanating in the MSM from a Clinton show in SC is "the Clintons are damaged goods in the South."  Which they are.

I suspect these numbers started breaking Tuesday, after Clinton's unbecoming scrap with Obama.  Clinton was never going to overtake Obama in SC.  But the Clinton team miscalculated.  They thought if Hillary fired both barrels at Obama, he'd wither.  He didn't.  It wasn't pretty, but Obama suffered merely a flesh wound from the firing of the Rezko allegation.  Edwards was able to play pastor, and call them out as fools.  Now, Edwards is surging in his own birth state with 48 hours to go.

So, the Clintons called in their chit with Punch Sulzburger, fellow New Yorker.  It's not like the Times decided Monday evening over cocktails to endorse Hillary.  This has been in the bag for months at least, and more likely years.  They needed Punch to pull the trigger tonight, because losing SC may very well mean losing the nomination. The very last meme Team Clinton wants going into Tsunami Tuesday is "third place Iowa, third place SC, the country must not want the Clintons."

It didn't have to be this way.  If Bill had kept his yap shut and joined the hoi polloi in Davos for their foie gras orgy, Hillary could be making her own time.  But Bill can't help himself, because he wants the third term, he wants to be spoken of in the same breath as FDR as the only president to reside for twelve, hell, sixteen years in the White House.  Don't believe for a moment that a narcissist like Bill Clinton doesn't salivate at that possibility.

As a nation, we literally pickled in Ken Starr's vat of panty sniffing for over two years (and it's important to be crass in our descriptions, to remind ourselves of the ick factor of that unnecessary spectacle).  The specific possibility of Bill Clinton returning to the White House, in whatever capacity, disturbs a clear majority of Americans.

That the blame for this revulsion should be attibuted mostly to Ken Starr and Newt Gingrich matters not.  Bill's gallant work on behalf of our park system and wildlife refuges, his deft diplomatic management of the Bosnian wars, his steerage of our deeply mourned economic surplus, his defeated efforts to preserve the NPT, and his human touch at OKC, all of this and more have long been squandered by the Party and -- crazily -- by the Clinton's themselves.  They have had a strong record to run on, but they don't.  If they had, we would have been reminded of these things over and over during the campaign, because they strengthened our country.  But in their joint conduct, in their immodest money grab and tandem dismissal of campaign finance reform, in Hillary's ambiguous moment when she discovered "her voice" before unloading on Barack, and in Bill's many finger-wagging Morris Moments, we must conclude their prize is power, or that they didn't trust us.  Neither is acceptable.

The fact that neither Edwards nor Obama has gone nuclear on Bill isn't surprising -- no good could come of it for the Democratic Party.  The best that could occur is voter deflation.  But Obama's and Edwards' high-road approach doesn't mean there isn't a huge resevoir of malaise from the impeachment years just beneath the surface, and every time Bill sanctimoniously cries "shame", it bubbles to the top.

Were I a Hillary supporter, I would be agitating mightily for his exile from the campaign.  He is an albatross around his wife's neck.  If Hillary wins the nomination, he'll be an albatross around the party's neck.  And if she loses to McCain because of Bill, he'd be an albatross around the nation's neck.  He had this one chance to restore his legacy as both a statesman and public husband, and he's blown it.

Political calculations have prevailed.  The Clintons are wagering no one will bring up their multiple flaws of the '90s, because they know as well as anybody it would damage the party.  And in the zero-sum game of their brand of politics, they attack and leverage freely based on this principle.  It has mostly worked to date, but we are awakening.

The Clintons are triangulating the Democratic Party.  Whatever Hillary's attributes, and they are many, the restoration of the Clintons to the White House will be bad for party, bad for the country, and bad for the world.  We need to turn the page.  Democrats need to turn the page.  The world needs to turn the page.  A progressive, forward-leaning politics under a second Clinton White House is not possible.  That wasn't clear at the outset.  It is now.

Smoke on your pipe and put that in, Punch.