[StBernard] The Great Right Hope, Hillary Clinton?

[Westley Annis]

The Great Right Hope, Hillary Clinton?

Nov. 20, 2008
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(Weekly Standard) This column was written by Noemie Emery.
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Campaign 2008, which went on for four years, if not for four centuries, was
rich in dramatic personae with strange tales -- candidates from Alaska, the
Canal Zone, and Hawaii; mavericks, moose-hunters, and multi-racial messiahs
-- but none has been so bizarre as the story of Hillary Clinton, who began
her career as the wife of a liberal president, who entered the race eons ago
as the liberal hope to become the first woman president, and who may end it
weeks after the fact as the third female secretary of state in our history,
the first ex-First Lady to become a top diplomat, to the relief and delight
of many conservatives. How did the feminist wife of Bill Clinton, demonized
as a fiend during much of his tenure, end up as the Great Right Hope of the
party they bested? The race changed her, and it, beyond all expectations. It
was all the campaign. 

Candidates of course plan their campaigns, but they are defined more than
they anticipate by their opponents, to whom they are forced to react. In
1992, Bill Clinton, an interesting and effective middle-way reform governor,
planned to run against liberal Mario Cuomo who would have the support of his
party's establishment. To his surprise, Cuomo bowed out, and he became by
default the establishment candidate. In 2000, George W. Bush, an interesting
and effective reform governor, planned to run against fiscal or social
conservatives as an inventive and maverick figure. He ran instead against
John McCain, the maverick's maverick, and became in his turn the
establishment figure, as the fiscal and social conservatives flocked to his
side by default. 

And so Hillary planned to run from the left against Evan Bayh or Mark
Warner, with the support of the backers she and her husband had wooed over
decades in politics: the civil rights groups, the gay and the feminist
lobbies, the glitterati of New York and Hollywood, the intellectuals and/or
academics, the mainstream and celebrity press. But Bayh and Warner dropped
out early on, and she was assailed from the left and above by Barack Obama,
whose appeal to her backers unraveled her base. She critiqued the Iraq war
and David Petraeus, but he was opposed from the very beginning. She appealed
to the young, but he was still younger. She ran as a star, but he was more
new, and more glittering. She ran to make history, but the history he was
making was much more compelling, as it spoke to undoing the country's most
terrible wrong. 

As he rose, all her old mainstays began to desert her. The trendies and
glitzies peeled off, as did the students. The civil rights lobbies peeled
off, as was expected. The feminists split. NARAL deserted, aborting her
hopes at a critical moment. Hollywood and the fashion world broke for her
rival, who looked like a film star, or a model for the Gap. The media
swooned, and began to assail her, deriding her style, and clothes. As her
previous base was collapsed by Obama, she responded by taking the only route
open: She morphed by default into the champion of middle-aged, middle-class,
small-town and middle America; of the more conservative, post-Reagan
Democrats; and, by her party's standards, the hawks. In no time at all,
Hillary Rodham of Wellesley and Yale became the new voice of the Democrats'
social conservatives, defending rural voters and small town inhabitants
against charges of "bitterness," saying elites had degraded the culture,
knocking back shots of Crown Royal in bars. If Obama was Gary Hart, she was
Henry (Scoop) Jackson; if he was the Priest, then she was the Warrior; if he
was the Academician, pacific, detached and non-confrontational, she was the
Jacksonian, ready to fight for her country and rights. 

In this incarnation, she began to attack Obama for his lack of war-on-terror
credentials, noting that she and John McCain had years of experience dealing
with war-and-peace issues, while Obama had speeches. She ran ads implying
Obama was not the right person to answer the phone when it rang in the White
House at three in the morning with news of a terrorist outrage. She didn't
just change, she seemed authentic in changing, as if a woman who had gone
through multiple makeovers during decades in politics had finally found a
persona that fit her. Martha's Vineyard flaked off, revealing the soul of a
Midwestern scrapper. Conservatives watched, with surprise, with some awe,
and with some bemusement. Perhaps this was her all along. 

In the spring, conservatives found themselves pulling for Clinton, in the
interests of keeping the Democratic feud going. But as time passed and she
refused to dissolve in the face of adversity, a strategic alliance based on
convenience became infused with a Strange New Respect. How tough she was.
How relentlessly viable. How she resisted the pressure of Obama obsessives,
who were trying to show her the door. And how right she was, at least from
their viewpoint, and at least upon foreign affairs. "Hillary became the sane
one in the race, at least from Republicans' perspectives," as Jennifer Rubin
observed as the race ended, noting that she was the one who had ridiculed
Obama's plans to meet unconditionally with the leaders of terrorist
governments, who had defied her party to vote to classify the Iranian
National Guard as a terrorist outfit, who had "looked at George
Stephanopoulos with a look of incredulity" when he asked why, if Iran
attacked Israel, she would bomb Iran into rubble, or at least smithereens. 

Hillary had begun the campaign as the former First Feminist and the
Empress-In-Waiting, ready to glide back into the White House on the strength
of her husband's connections and donor base. She ended it as the Warrior
Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem, alone in the last ditch
as her false friends deserted, (and her husband proved useless), in her own
private Alamo, fighting on to the end. The Alamo tends to loom large in
conservative fantasies, which tend to feature John Waynes rather than Jane
Fondas. Hillary, in the minds of some righties, had crossed over a crucial
divide. 

This shift in the Hillary Clinton persona did not go unobserved on the left,
which commenced to tear her apart in the same terms of endearment it would
later unleash upon Sarah Palin, and had used before on George W. Bush and
Joe Lieberman. Moveon.org, founded ten years ago by liberal Democrats to
defend the Clintons against impeachment proceedings, now assailed her with
the savage ferocity they had once reserved for Ken Starr. As a result,
perhaps, Hillary later refused to attack Sarah Palin, and treated her, and
McCain, with personal courtesy throughout the campaign. 

As for the conservatives, many of those who began 2008 willing to do
anything to defeat her tended to end it feeling sorry she lost. They began
to tell themselves and each other they would sleep better at night if she
were the nominee of her party, for reasons having to do with the now-famous
three a.m. phone call. She would not, they said, have gone to Berlin and
said that the city was saved by the world coming together; she would have
known that the Air Force had something to do with it. As thoughts turned
later on to possible cabinet picks, the thought of Hugo Chavez and Vladimir
Putin staring into the clueless eyes of John Kerry and/or Bill Richardson
roused still more anxiety. Better the steely gimlet-eyed stare of a Hillary
Clinton. They feared Iran now, not the former First Lady. The days when they
feared her now seemed far away. 

This explains the elation (okay, the relief) that swept over some in
conservative circles when it seemed likely that the steely-eyed stare of
Hillary Clinton was what Iran, Venezuela, and Russia were likely to get.
Differences remain still with Hillary Clinton, but most of these are on
social and size-of-government issues, which in her projected new post would
be immaterial, much as they would have been if John McCain had won and then
named Joe Lieberman, the one Democrat even more hawkish than Hillary, as his
man at State or Defense. As it is, foreign policy is the one area in which
her ideas seem somewhat in line with those of conservatives; and at any
rate, she is the best thing they are likely to get. For the moment, Hillary
Clinton will be the conservatives' Woman in Washington, more attuned to
their concerns on these issues than to those of the get-the-troops-home-now
wing of her party, a strange turn of events for a woman whose husband was
impeached by Republicans just ten years ago, and whose ascent that party had
dreaded since she went to the Senate two years after that. 

It's a long trek from vast right-wing conspiracy to Great Right Hope, but
Hillary Clinton, with the help of the far left, has made it. Strange things,
people tell you, can happen in politics. But not many much stranger than
this.


By Noemie Emery
Reprinted with permission from The Weekly Standard.