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March 24, 2008

Hillary's Berserker Campaign ... for 2012

Blonde Ambition
By JEFFREY ST CLAIR

Hillary Clinton can not win the Democratic nomination for president. The numbers tell the
story. Even with robust victories in Pennsylvania, Indiana, West Virginia and Kentucky,
Hillary will trail Obama in popular votes and pledged delegates as they enter the
convention hall in Denver.
Any other candidate would have been shamed into dropping out long ago. But these are
the Clintons and they have no shame.
So why does Hillary persist? Because she hasn't abandoned her aspiration for the White
House. Not in 2008, but for 2012. Here's the perverse logic at work.
If Obama defeats McCain in November, it will take an act of treachery beyond anything
even the Clintons have ever conjured from their grimoire of political demonology for
Hillary to challenge him in 2012. She will be 69 in 2016, almost ready to move into one
of the Beverly Nursing Homes, owned by a company she once represented as a
corporate lawyer, aggressively protecting the bottom line against such extravagances as
healthy meals, clean sheets and proper medical care for the elderly.
Hillary Clinton is the prisoner of an unimpeachable mathematics. So she makes the most
of a remorseless situation by doing what the Clintons do best: commit political fratricide.
Quite literally, in this case, by knocking off a brother.
In order to realize her vaulting ambition, Hillary must mortally wound Obama as
candidate in the fall race against John McCain so that she can run against McCain in
2012.
McCain is at best a one term president. The signs of this are as clear as the scar jagging
down his face. McCain, whose resemblance to Lon Chaney becomes eerier by the day, is
already an old man, older than Reagan when he was first elected. He is plagued by a
cancer he refuses to speak about, a war he refuses to end and an economy that is
collapsing beyond the point of recovery. Add to this prospectus, the fact that McCain is
prone to the most self-destructive impulses of any American politician since Aaron Burr.
His political fate will be sealed before he even swears his oath.
Thus Hillary's berserker strategy against Obama. (For more on "berserkerism" see the SF
novels of Fred Saberhagen.)
Down in Mark Penn's dark computer lab, the data culled from pulse polls and focus
groups probing the hidden prejudices in the psyche of white America are being packed
like shrapnel into political landmines set for Obama: he's unpatriotic, he's un-Christian,
he's a Palestinian symp and, yes, he's black. That's three strikes and one head shot.
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Exploitation of racial panic is second nature to the power couple Ishmael Reed calls Ma
and Pa Clinton. Bill Clinton launched his 1992 campaign by personally overseeing the
execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged young black man. He wagged his finger
at the rapper Sister Souljah, denouncing her music and political opinions as a danger to
young minds. The Clintons pilloried their one-time friend Lani Guinier, for her legal
writings on the status of blacks and women and booted Dr. Jocelyn Elders from her
position as Surgeon General for her refreshingly candid statements about the utility of
condoms and masturbation for sexually active youths.
And that's how they treated people they knew. At a structural level, the Clintons'
economic and social agenda, incubated at the conservative Democratic Leadership
Council, struck directly at poorest precincts of America, targeting blacks and Hispanics
with a fervor not seen since Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips crafted the infamous
Southern Strategy for Richard Nixon. Hence, the dismantling of welfare, harsh federal
crime bills, the refusal to intervene against racial profiling or redress the grievous
injustices caused by the racially-motivated sentences handed out for crack cocaine.
The fallout from Ms. Clinton's racially-tinged blitz against Obama will spread far and wide
across her party like the toxic particles from a nuclear blast. They've done it all before.
The Clintons' reckless first two years in the White House, from the heavy-handed Travel
Office fiasco to the fires of Waco and HRC's sophomoric bungling of the health care
reform, spurred the GOP takeover of congress in 1994, which they used to their political
profit. Then in 1996, Clinton refused to allocate DNC money to tight senate and
congressional races, a miserly tactic that allowed the faltering Republicans to retain
control of both houses of Congress. It was a cynical decision that many high-ranking
Democrats believe constituted a deliberate sabotage of the party's prospects, designed
to secure a monopoly-like control of the party apparatus for the Clintons, turning the
DNC into their own private PAC.
That's the logic of triangulation. The daisy-cutter tactics of Hillary's current campaign
might be called pre-emptive triangulation. The Clintons enrich themselves politically by
looting the ruins of their own party.
Look how swiftly her campaign knee-capped her friend Bill Richardson. After working
sedulously for Richardson's endorsement only to lose out to Obama, Mark Penn
dismissed the governor as "irrelevant." On Good Friday, Clinton intimate James Carville
denounced Richardson as "a Judas."
Clinton believes she must destroy the party in order to save it-for herself. But her
campaign geared at women and white working class voters relies on a perversion of the
past. The recent past at that, as if they believe that the American electorate is blinking
out from a kind of political Alzheimer's, where the short-term goes first. Perhaps that's
why Penn and his pack of geeks geared their themes to appeal to geezers and
grandparents. Clintontime is recast as a glittering epoch of peace and prosperity. Yet this
was a decade when Iraq was bombed every three days and a half-million people died
under the cruel sanctions regime, when cruise missiles where launched on Sudan and
Afghanistan to divert popular attention blow-jobs and thong-snapping interns, when an
illegal air war was orchestrated against Serbia, racking up thousands of civilian
casualties and the ongoing bloodbath against peasants in South America known as Plan
Colombia, the drug war that keeps on killing.
The Clinton 90s was a time when the economic chasm in America between the rich and
everyone else deepened and widened profoundly, under the command of Alan
Greenspan and Wall Street maestro Robert Rubin, and the social safety nets protecting
the most vulnerable among us where shorn in the name of political pragmatism. The
Clintons evoke a nostalgia for a time that never was. If you require objective
confirmation of the economic enervation unleashed by the Clinton program consult
Contours of Descent, economist Robert Pollin's brilliant dissection of that dismal era.
This coarse reality is transparent to those who lived through it and still suffer the
aftershocks of the Clintons' neoliberal program. That's one reason why almost the only
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blacks to back HRC are encrusted members of Congressional Black Caucus and
corporate shills like Andrew Young, who whitewashed Nike's crimes against workers in its
Asian sweat-factories. Both camps are old hands at palming political gratuities and
walking around money.
Meanwhile, Obama plays the role of willing victim like he had trained for it at Actor's
Studio. He exudes a sense of entitlement nearly as all-engrossing as the Clintons and
compounds this with a martydom complex that dramatizes the wounding of each sling
and arrow lobbed his way.
Although it's not strictly attuned to her peculiar pathology, Hillary could almost call it
quits right now, even before she claims Pennsylvania as a scalp. She has fatally toxified
Obama and almost certainly secured the White House for her good friend John McCain.
Hillary is following the Reagan model. In 1976, Ronald Reagan bled Gerald Ford through
the long winter and spring months, before bludgeoning him the late primary in
Pennsylvania. As told in Adam Clymer's new book, Drawing the Line at the Big Ditch: the
Panama Canal Treaties and the Rise of the Right, Reagan finally found a theme to his
weird internecine challenge in the Panama Canal Treaty. Reagan fell short in the end,
but he had hobbled Ford, who stumbled and fell against Carter in the fall election. Carter
inherited a stagnant economy, soaring oil prices and a simmering crisis in the Middle
East. Reagan easily unseated Carter in the 1980 election. The Clintons are shrewd
enough to detect the striking historical parallels here and craven enough to exploit them
for their own long-term advantage.
The Clinton war room may still throb to the beats of Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop
Thinking About Tomorrow." But late at night, when Mandy Grunwald has slipped on her
flannels and Mark Penn has powered-down his Cray super-computer, Hillary and Bill will
surely toast their strange time-delayed victory to the chords of McCartney's "Live and Let
Die."

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the
Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, will
be published this spring. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net