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THE BIG STORY of the campaign so far has been the apparent end of Hillary’s hopes. Today is all Clinton collapse day, humor section and all. Borowitz, Scrappleface, and all the ‘toons. Borowitz says Hillary has repackaged herself as a black man.
Peter Wehner sets the tone.
… There are many things to say about the deeper meaning of this moment and what its passing will signify. Suffice it to say that it will be good, very good, for us to say farewell to the couple that brought you Carville, Begala, Blumenthal, and Ickes; the “war room,†the use of private investigators, and attacks on women like Dolly Kyle Browning, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, and Kathleen Willey; impeachment for perjurious, false and misleading testimony to a grand jury; contempt of court findings; the promiscuous smearing of those whom they viewed as threat to their power; the charges of a “vast right-wing conspiracy†and assurances that “I did not have sexual relations with that womanâ€; and so much more.
On the eve of the New Hampshire vote and all it will mean, it’s worth recalling the words of the late, great Michael Kelly:
The lie at the heart of the vast and varied lie that is Bill Clinton’s defense is that lying is a victimless crime – and something that properly exists as a moral concern only between the liar and his maker and a few people immediately affected. But this is not so. Lying corrupts, and an absolute liar corrupts absolutely, and the corruption spread by the lies of the absolutely mendacious Clinton is becoming frightening to behold.
After she loses, Hillary Clinton will remain in the Senate, of course, and Bill Clinton will continue to make millions through his public speeches. They will not completely disappear from the national scene. But their days as a Democratic dynasty, and their center-stage role in American politics, are about to end.
John Fund is next.
Then Noemie Emery. She reviews Sally Bedell Smith’s recent book on the Clintons.
Between January 20, 1993, and January 20, 2001, the Clinton White House was home to three boomers of boundless ambition, high expectations, and vast self-regard, all three of whom thought that they ought to be president. Of these, only one–Bill Clinton–really was president. But the other two–his wife Hillary and his vice president, Albert Gore Jr.–firmly believed that they should be and viewed Bill’s terms in office as the jumping-off place to their own.
Unfortunately, only one–Bill, again–was a born, or even a good, politician, making the two others dependent upon him, first to lift them to within striking distance of power, and then to help them campaign. But Bill, too, had his problems, and so needed them: to keep him focused and disciplined, to impose some sense of order, to reassure voters disturbed by his fast-and-loose manners, and at least in the case of Hillary Clinton, to help him suppress and/or cope with his bimbo eruptions, if and when worst came to worst.
Sensing his needs, Bill picked his running mates carefully, but the resulting arrangements were not without stress. Bill needed both Gore and Hillary, but often resented attempts to restrain him. Gore and Hillary needed Bill, and resented each other. Hillary was in a state of continuous rage over Bill’s chronic adulteries. And Gore, a senator’s son who had been pointed from birth at the White House, and was seen by his friends and possibly by himself as being “more presidential” than Clinton, was in a state of anxiety about his own run.
How this played out is laid out in hair-raising detail in Sally Bedell Smith’s account of an administration and marriage like none other in history, and one that bred the highest level of dysfunctional angst ever seen in the White House–except for those moments when Richard Nixon dined alone. …
… Bill, it was clear, had an array of gifts that most power-seekers would kill for, but even these were frequently undermined by the stunning array of his faults. He was wholly unfocused, completely disorganized, and prey to a set of adolescent compulsions that even he could not start to explain. In his first two years as president (or before the Republican Congress forced focus upon him), his White House was described as resembling a college dormitory, a kindergarten, a free-for-all, or a claque of small children engaged in a soccer game, in a tumultuous scramble to fall on the ball. For no good reason, he would stay up all night, and be so exhausted the following morning he would doze off the next day. (“He can barely stay awake at today’s meeting,” Robert Reich noted, of one early session. “His eyelids droop and his pupils move up under them, leaving nothing but a narrow sliver of white.”)
“Bill’s lifelong inability to set boundaries threw policy making into turmoil,” Smith informs us. “Meetings scheduled for ten minutes routinely stretched to two hours as Bill pursued his favorite digressions. One session on Bosnia lasted seven hours without coming to a resolution. Rather than following a crisp checklist, Bill delayed decisions as long as possible,” endlessly seeking new facts. Every day, said an aide, was “a long road with quite a few detours” as Bill veered off course and off schedule. Everything was delayed, and everyone was kept waiting, from world leaders such as Helmut Kohl and John Major to a group of elderly Holocaust survivors, who were left standing under a tent in a rainstorm for hours while Bill loitered elsewhere. …
… With all of this chaos, Bill was in need of someone to restrain him in order to function, which led to his reliance on Hillary, and to a lesser extent on Al Gore. Bill needed a wife who would allow him to stray and not leave him, but would instead turn her anger against their joint enemies. This Hillary was; but she was also his opposite–disciplined, focused, intense, and pedantic–the essence of order, the Super Ego to his lively and rampaging Id. In Hillary, a woman who shared his intense love of politics but brought an entirely opposing set of skills (and deficiencies) to their joint quest for power, Bill found his corrective, his balance wheel, his apologist, and his true mate.
While they shared the same goals, she was his opposite in mind and in temperament: wholly controlled and rigidly disciplined, with a stolid, linear intelligence as opposed to his free-range, intuitive mind. At the same time, she had poor people skills, disliked campaigning, and found it grinding hard work.
“She is always on, like an assembly line,” Smith quotes a fundraiser. “Every interaction we have had has been identical. .  .  . She is the most controlled and disciplined person I ever met.” Her control slipped only in the case of his scandals, which, as part of their bargain, she was expected both to suppress and excuse. She usually finessed this by redirecting her fury toward Clinton’s accusers, but she remained in a perpetual state of resentment and anger, which spilled over to Bill and his aides.
“Her dissatisfaction could curdle the atmosphere when she directed her ire at his subordinates,” Smith informs us. “Washington advisers found it ‘demoralizing.’ .  .  . The most unnerving aspect .  .  . was their use of profanity, especially ‘f–k’ and ‘s–t.’ ” …
… With a keen sense of self-preservation, Bill Clinton picked his two most important political partners to help himself function, to compensate for his frailties, to atone for his sins. Intuitive, seductive, empathetic, and sometimes inspired, but wholly deficient in focus and discipline, he sought out partners with focus and discipline, and orderly, literal, minds. They served his needs, in that they helped him to function; but as he had his failings, they too had theirs.
With their rigor and discipline went a lack of intuition and nuance–the je ne sais quoi that makes a political talent, and that no amount of effort and diligence can ever supply. Bill loved campaigning; Gore found it a struggle, and his torment was obvious. Hillary is an unhappy warrior–at best, a grim one–and her description of the anticipated evisceration of Barack Obama as the “fun” part was a chilling moment that surprised no one who has looked into For Love of Politics.
Unlike Bill, Gore and Hillary have no sense of how they appear to others, and seldom fail to make the wrong gesture–Hillary’s cackle, the grating “caw” she unleashes in efforts at levity, is on a par with the sighs, eye-rolling, and other strange efforts at intimidation that helped Gore lose the election in the 2000 debates. With their conspicuous lack of political talents, neither Gore nor Hillary would ever have reached the top tier of candidates if they had not been elevated by being chosen by Clinton. But if they had been more graceful, and less pedantic and heavy-handed, they would not have been chosen, as they would not have supplied what Bill lacked.
It was a bargain that worked well for Bill, but ended in heartbreak for Gore, and may do the same thing for Hillary Clinton. This story is not over yet.
NY Times reports on the Clinton campaign.
Is this what it would have been like had Elvis been reduced to playing Reno?
Former President Bill Clinton has been drawing sleepy and sometimes smallish crowds at big venues in the state that revived his presidential campaign in 1992. He entered to polite applause and rows of empty seats at the University of New Hampshire on Friday. Several people filed out midspeech, and the room was largely quiet as he spoke, with few interruptions for laughter or applause. He talked about his administration, his foundation work and some about his wife.
“Hillary’s got good plans,†Mr. Clinton kept saying as he worked through a hoarse-voiced litany of why his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, is a “world-class change agent.†He urged his audience to “caucus†on Tuesday for Mrs. Clinton, before correcting himself (“voteâ€). He took questions, quickly worked a rope line and left. …
The Captain comments on the Times story.
Karen Tumulty of Time adds more.
The scope of Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa has shaken the Clinton machine down to its bolts. Donors are panicking. The campaign has been making a round of calls to reassure notoriously fickle “superdelegates” — elected officials and party regulars who are awarded convention spots by virtue of their titles and positions — who might be reconsidering their decisions to back the candidate who formerly looked like a sure winner. And internally, a round of recriminations is being aimed at her chief strategist, Mark Penn, as the representative of everything about her pseudo-incumbent campaign that has been too cautious, too arrogant, too conventional and too clueless as to how much the political landscape has shifted since the last Clinton reign. One adviser summed up the biggest challenge that faces the campaign in two words: “Fresh thinking.”
Specifically, those inside the campaign and outside advisers fault Penn for failing to see the Iowa defeat coming. They say he was assuring Clinton and her allies right up until the caucuses that they would win it. Says one: “He did not predict in any way, shape or form the tidal wave we saw.” In particular, he had assured them that Clinton’s support among women would carry her through. Yet she managed to win only 30% of the women’s vote, while 35% of them went for Obama. …
Back to the Weekly Standard as Dean Barnett looks at the Clinton camp with skepticism.
… On Thursday night, Iowans acknowledged the patent hollowness of Senator Clinton’s campaign by rebuking her with an embarrassing third-place finish. Nonetheless, the senator, like a true political warhorse, greeted the setback with a strange “victory” speech. It went on and on, and was filled with empty, awkwardly worded platitudes:
What is most important now is that, as we go on with this contest, that we keep focused on the two big issues, that we answer correctly the questions that each of us has posed. How will we win in November 2008? By nominating a candidate who will be able to go the distance and who will be the best president on Day One.
The emptiness of her campaign was never more apparent. As she delivered these meaningless comments, assorted relics from the 1990s hovered like ghostly apparitions. To her right stood a beaming but ashen Wes Clark. Madeleine Albright mourned immediately behind her. And to her left stood the former president. As the New York Times’s Adam Nagourney aptly put it, President Clinton’s “face [was] frozen in a smile.” It was never more obvious that the House of Clinton’s hour had passed. …