The Chris Moeller Archives

The Clintons hit New Hampshire

A miscreant has been released from his cage. Bill Clinton is once again prowling the presidential campaign trail. The latest version looks pale and more corpselike than we remember, but that oily rhetoric is as disingenuous and focus group-controlled as it ever was.

Despite a rash of remarkably good fortune-- Hillary is even luckier at coin flips than she is at cattle futures-- the Democratic Party’s establishment campaign is tipping towards Code Orange. The one and only knock against Bernie Sanders-- his supposed unelectability-- has been blown to smithereens by the latest polls, so, like his daughter before him, Bill has been sent to the stump with a script of misinformation and his work cut out for him. Just how dull have the edges become around this group of experienced political hacks that they’re retreating to the right even before the primary season has ended. The old Bill and Hillary knew enough to pander to liberals at least through Super Tuesday.

Bill tackled historical precedent yesterday. The Clintons were among the corporate Democrats in 2000 and 2004 that demonized Ralph Nader for running an independent presidential campaign against the Democrats in the general election. Hillary said at the time, "His campaign in 2000 cost Al Gore the election. He claimed he was in it against corporate interest because he cared about the environment... and he basically deprived America of the greenest president we could have had, and someone who I don't believe would have made a lot of the mistakes that unfortunately we've had to live with from President Bush." (I wondered if she's referring to the colossal mistake of going to war against Iraq, a mistake she voted for.) Now that script must be upside-down because check out this statement by Bill on Sunday. He said that, because Sanders has been an active fundraiser for the party, having "hobnobbed with the millionaires and billionaires," he "might have to tweak" his anti-Wall Street rhetoric "or we might have to get a write-in candidate.

Wow. "A write-in candidate." He really went there. I mean I knew it would happen, but not during the first week of February. Would the Goldman Sachs wing of the Democratic party really subvert the effort by abandoning Bernie Sanders as the party’s nominee? Because if they do, a George W. Bush might be elected? Any and all wars started by the Trump White House would be the fault of these subversives. It would cost progressives the 'x' number of seats that will come up for grabs on the Supreme Court during the next four years. This is the most important election of our lifetime.TM

Bill wasn’t done. He went on to lie that the “Bernie Bros,’ the mythical misogynists of the interwebs, were wreaking havoc online, subjecting Hillary’s supporters to "vicious trolling and attacks." What he's attempting to conjure is laughable in so many ways. First of all, arguably no American politician ever publicly disgraced a woman as much as Bill did Hillary for the duration of a long career. He is misogyny in the flesh. The 42nd President’s litany of crimes against women would be enough to make his wife a sympathetic actor if she hadn’t routinely acted as his co-conspirator in defaming the victims of the state power he exercised. In Hillary’s rhetorical world, “every survivor of sexual assault deserves to be heard, believed and supported." Unless that woman is Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, or Kathleen Willey, just a few of the female stalkers that dogged Clinton's every step during his time in executive office. Clinton's supporters "trolled" Bill's employment underlings and sexual assault accusers by calling them bimbos, liars, "trailer trash," and whores. And those were not online trolls, those were the operatives in the Clinton West Wing.

I know that Bill telling manufactured stories at a campaign rally are pretty mild stuff compared with the stunt he pulled the week prior to the 1992 New Hampshire Primary-- that’s the cycle during which he flew to Arkansas to supervise the execution of a retarded African-American, Rickey Ray Rector, a victim of the state who saved the dessert from his last meal "for later"-- but it’s still enough to get one’s blood boiling.

Also, there is no such thing as a "Bernie Bro." Reptilian Clinton surrogates invented that concept sometime during a closed-door meeting last week after the campaign’s ugly polling numbers among young women started bleeding onto her polling numbers with all women. The same condescending electoral strategy includes unleashing Gloria Steinem onto the Bill Maher show to suggest that young women are following Bernie because "where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie," and then to have Madeline Albright say explicitly to Bernie’s female supporters, while standing on stage next to Hillary, that “there’s a special place in hell for women who don't help each other.” Historical legacies are being torched this year faster than poll numbers are reversing.

It’s hard to believe that these tactics, which can be called "Clintonian" with historical context, would be successful with progressive voters, but we’ve seen it before. The problem they have running against a Bernie Sanders-- or a Ralph Nader for that matter-- is that both the public records and private lives of these candidates are unimpeachable. The only avenues left are distortion and dishonesty, and those aren't off-ramps for the ethically-challenged. There have obviously been some hurried, anxious meetings in the Clinton camp in recent days. A sixteen-year personal bid for the presidency, fueled first by the public's affection for a wronged woman and then by gobs and gobs of Wall Street cash, is being permanently endangered-- and by a Socialist candidate at that. The level of frustration and anger that reality must cause for the Clinton team and its supporters is probably equal to the level of beautiful poignancy it means for true progressive revolutionaries.

The triangulators, having long ago abandoned the principles of the New Deal that Bernie champions, must be asking themselves, what can we say now to voters to stop the hemorrhaging? But there is nothing they can say. There are positive indicators now that we're on the verge of a new breed of voter. The internet has changed democracy. The echo chamber for left-wing radicalism, of which this blog has been a small part for eleven years, reverberates louder than ever. The art of political spin is no longer respected by either the right or the left. The people want truth. The news media can engage in an almost complete blackout of the Sanders campaign, and it did-- in 2015, ABC News devoted 261 minutes to the 2016 race, 81 minutes to Donald Trump and 20 seconds to Bernie, and still the revolution rises. Perhaps it’s the case-- finally-- that what you do-- and have done-- in American politics really does count for more than what you say. If that’s the case, say a final goodbye to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

posted by CM @ 8:09 PM