[Peace-discuss] Presidential elections

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Best account I've seen yet on where the presidential campaign stands at 
tea-break: but it ain't cricket, so to speak.  --CGE]

	March 24, 2008
	Blonde Ambition
	By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

Hillary Clinton cannot 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.

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 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 at comcast.net.

http://www.counterpunch.org/