It's all about the Clintons

Shaun CarneyApril 29, 2008
It's a fine line between self-belief and self-obsession when it comes to the dynamic duo of Hillary and Bill.
IS HILLARY Clinton phenomenally tenacious or just plain mad? If she is to overtake Barack Obama's haul of pledged delegates, she will have to win 80% of the vote in the eight Democratic primaries and one caucus that remain. Unless something truly catastrophic happens inside Obama's campaign that isn't going to happen. When the final primaries in Montana and South Dakota are held five weeks from now, it's extremely likely that Obama will be the presumptive presidential nominee — even Clinton's supporters must know that. And yet, Clinton's appetite for the battle with Obama is overwhelming. Bolstered by victory in Pennsylvania last week, the Clinton campaign is in a state of near-frenzy in the lead-up to next Tuesday's Indiana and North Carolina primaries.
What is this all about? In truth, Obama is not running against Hillary Clinton, he is running against the Clintons — a political machine headed by the New York senator and her ex-president husband, Bill, that includes some of the most ruthless operators in modern politics. The Clinton machine is fuelled by a smorgasbord of pathologies and resentments, some of them based on genuine experiences and others the product of quite frightening self-obsession. It's been clear for many months now that what the Clintons are proposing is a sort of co-presidency, with Bill — prohibited by the US constitution from running again — doing much more than conducting occasional morning coffees in the White House and doing some charitable work.
One of the key challenges faced by Hillary and her senior campaign operatives during the battle against Obama has been knowing the right times to let Bill out of his box. On most occasions so far, it's backfired. Florid of complexion and barely able to contain his fury that anyone could presume to stand in the Clintons' way, Bill has served up blooper after blooper, culminating — so far — in his absurd assertion last week that the Obama campaign had somehow played the race card against him. It's been a far cry from his well-earned reputation as a preternaturally gifted political player, a public performer with an innate ability to nuance and deflect an argument or a controversy.
But then again, their past strength has become potentially a powerful weakness; they've finessed and finagled for so long, and defied expectations and got through so many scrapes so many times that they're utterly immersed in their own mythology. Remember: Bill was "the comeback kid" who lost the Arkansas governorship and then got it back again, who looked gone during the Democratic primaries in 1992 and still got the nomination, who looked finished over the Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging controversies but still won the presidency, who looked done for after the 1994 congressional election wipeout and was re-elected two years later, who lied about Monica Lewinsky and stared down the Senate over his impeachment.

With all that history, the Clintons have assumed an approach to their political activities that has been wrongly described as a sense of entitlement. A sense of entitlement could correctly be ascribed to the Bushes, who've been on the receiving end of Republican-sponsored preferment going back to at least the 1960s. When George W. Bush decided he wanted to run in the 2000 election, the Republican establishment locked in and old consiglieres from administrations going all the way back to Nixon such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld threw their weight behind him. The Clintons, on the other hand, have always been Washington outsiders. Although their determination to stay in the 2008 Democratic race is regularly viewed through a prism that sets a Bush dynasty against a Clinton dynasty, the Clintons' ambitions and motivations are less lofty. They are driven to settle old scores, to prove once and for all to the doubters and perceived enemies that they — the couple from Arkansas — will always prevail. It's significant that it was Hillary who in 1998, at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, attributed her husband's troubles to a "vast right-wing conspiracy"; it wasn't him, it was all these other people.
Ten years later, the line between reality and fantasy, between what is and what should be, has become even more blurred. The position of the Clinton campaign now is that Hillary leads Obama on the popular vote not because she does but because she and Bill can no longer accept that she does not. So on the back of her win in Pennsylvania, and with the US media now hungry for a new narrative and different dynamic in the Democratic contest — one that conforms to the "comeback kid" trope — she is arguing that because she supposedly triumphed in Florida and Michigan she has more votes than Obama. The primaries in those states were scheduled contrary to the party's rules and were declared void by national officials before they were conducted; they were such a dead rubber that in Michigan, Obama did not even put his name on the ballot paper. If the Clintons will go to these lengths, there is no reason to expect that they will withdraw from the battle with Obama any time soon — or any time at all, really.
To get a sense of the effect of the Clintons' wild-eyed refusal to accept the likelihood of defeat, consider the reversal taking place among African-Americans. The black community was always a rusted-on constituency of Bill Clinton's. Early in the contest, most blacks stuck with Hillary, believing Obama wasn't "black" enough. Now, they're solidly in Obama's camp and are appalled at the Clintons' trashing of him. The Clintons don't seem to care. They're a couple with big appetites and it's the fighting to sustain their view of themselves as indomitable that they love more than anything else.
Shaun Carney is associate editor.
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