Monday, February 11, 2008 - Posts
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After the events of this past weekend, it’s very difficult to hear Hillary Clinton extol the virtues of forgiveness. Indeed it’s extremely hard to hear Sen. Clinton say anything at all today over the relentless drumbeat in my own mind: “Don’t say pimp ... don’t say pimp ...”
I really need this job.
Clinton is typically fluid and charming before more than 800 students in American Politics 101, a class taught by the legendary Larry Sabato, at the University of Virginia. Batting back questions about biofuels and stem-cell research and universal health care with data and talking points, Clinton gets a solid 10 for technical merit. Still, you can’t help but wince when she gets to the parts of her remarks in which she describes people who lose their jobs. Clinton’s compassion for America’s unemployed is seemingly boundless, unless the unemployed in question have dissed her daughter.
The remarks seem to spin off into a different stratosphere in response to a student question about the “most influential person in her political career.” After paying homage to the Roosevelts, JFK, and LBJ, and with just a roundabout reference to her husband, Clinton arrives at Nelson Mandela. She describes Mandela at his inauguration, introducing three prison guards who’d treated him humanely in his many years at Robben Island. She quotes Mandela saying, “If I left prison embittered and full of hate, I would still be in prison. ... You have to give up whatever hate you have. You must learn to forgive.”
This is obviously a lesson with which Clinton still struggles. She can describe how powerfully it affected her that Mandela—in a spirit of bipartisan trust and hope—left the army and police force intact when he assumed power, while she cautions that 40 percent of Americans won't support a Democratic nominee regardless of who wins, presumably because there can be no trust or hope. She can claim to have forged deep personal friendships with individual Republicans—from Lindsey Graham to Sam Brownback—by getting beyond “caricatures” and “stereotypes.” But then she warns that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will surely be swift-boated—“subject to the full force of the Republican machine,” because “that’s what they’re good at.”
And Clinton draws a distinction between herself and Barack Obama when she says, “I have no illusions about bringing the country together in the absence of a fight.” But the implicit distinction between herself and Mandela is there, too. She wants reconciliation, and she wants to forgive, but she can’t get beyond her certainty that what needs forgiving and reconciling is an immovable wall that only she can overcome. Clinton wants to say that she, like Mandela, has not been exiled to some remote emotional prison of bitterness and hate. Yet she just saw to it that a reporter was suspended for saying mean words.
Dan Gross pointed out earlier today that the Clintons have a complicated relationship with forgiveness and redemption. Hillary Clinton wants to believe she’s forgiven what’s been done to her while warning us that she’s the only one tough enough to stand up to the next round of it. As always seems to be the case with the Clintons, the political is personal. The personal is personal, too.
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Here's Hillary on how things are going:
Solis Doyle's departure capped a rough weekend for Clinton after she lost the Louisiana primary and caucuses in Nebraska, Washington state, Maine and the Virgin Islands to Obama. She said she never expected to do well in any of those contests, even though she had been favored to win Maine. Clinton repeated her criticism that the caucus system is undemocratic and caters mostly to party activists. As for Louisiana, "You had a very strong and very proud African-American electorate, which I totally respect and understand," Clinton said.
So she didn't expect to win Nebraska, Washington state, and Maine because ... they're so white? At least, unlike her husband, she didn't mention Jesse Jackson—who also won Louisiana in 1984.
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Wouldn't you love to know the back story on Paul Krugman's column today? Because without knowing that his real beef is that his wife can't stop singing "Yes, we can," or maybe that his idiot nephew won't shut up about how all the cool people are on the O Train, it's all very mysterious: What is he referring to when he says "most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody''? That Obama's supporters are not chill like Hillary Clinton's?
That is a fresh take, definitely, but where did he get the impression that "many Obama supporters seem happy with the application of 'Clinton rules'—the term a number of observers use for the way pundits and some news organizations treat any action or statement by the Clintons, no matter how innocuous, as proof of evil intent.'' Then he draws a straight line from there to ... Whitewater? Suggesting what? That if not Obama then those who mindlessly follow him approved of the vast right-wing thing? I'd hate to put this non-sequitur on a par with Krugman's buddy Bush mentioning 9/11 in the same breath with Saddam—but we're all in some danger, aren't we, of mirroring what we loathe?
His least original point, about how "the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality,'' is one I hear all the time from Hillary supporters who claim it is a sign of immaturity to support Obama and that to believe there is any other way of doing business is really to believe in a fairy tale. But thinking that any one group or campaign or party has cornered the market on "most of the venom'' is what seems like kid stuff to me.
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I just figured out why I might have such kinship with the heroin freak. Her father is a cabdriver! Outside the Holy Land, we must be among the very few Jewish women who can make that claim.
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Fascinating post, Dan. It would have been fine if Hillary said the "pimped out" remark was contemptible, Shuster apologized, and everyone moved on. But I agree that it is discomforting when the person who wants to be president demands someone be fired for an offensive comment. And does Hillary really want to be delivering the message that we can expect her administration to respond with thin-skinned victimization to ill-considered remarks? I believe Hillary was genuinely offended, but she is also pushing this so hard because she thinks it will somehow play well. How exhausting. Especially when you compare it to how gracefully Obama has brushed off the racial insinuations in this campaign.
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A guest post from Daniel Gross, who writes Slate's "Moneybox" column:
I'll declare my interest upfront: David Shuster has been one of my closest friends for 26 years, long before we got into journalism. So if you want to dismiss this whole post, a priori, feel free.
No matter how much the term pimp has become mainstreamed, it is was a poor choice of words. But the efforts to paint Shuster as a malicious misogynist are way off-base. He has been a scrupulously honest and fair reporter for 18 years—at CNN, at ABC's Little Rock affiliate, at Fox News Channel, and MSNBC—and he richly does not deserve the storm of criticism and pressure being rained upon him.
Context, of course, is everything. As the Clinton campaign noted, there has been a "pattern of behavior" of on-air hosts at MSNBC and other outlets making derogatory references to women in general, and to Hillary in particular. Critics have charged that Chris Matthews, the anchor of MSNBC, is an offender in this regard. The cable news landscape is filled with men who let their bile-filled ids run rampant. CNN's Glenn Beck is Archie Bunker without the comic timing. Bill. O. Reilly. But these clowns are largely condoned—no, encouraged—by their bosses. And they never apologize. And they're never suspended.
Shuster, who has been suspended by MSNBC, apologized on the air—twice. On Friday, he tried to apologize personally to Hillary and Chelsea—on the phone and via e-mail—but was rebuffed. On Saturday, the Clinton campaign released a letter to NBC head Steve Capus declaring that "no temporary suspension or half-hearted apology is sufficient." In effect, a U.S. senator called for General Electric, a publicly held company with all sorts of interests in front of the government, to fire one of its employees.
The Clintons' refusal to accept an apology is strange given that they are among our era's great forgivers. Hillary has forgiven Bill for the enormously public humiliations he inflicted on her and Chelsea in the late 1990s. All the Clintons have shown an ability gracefully to reconcile with their implacable foes. In recent years, Hillary has buddied up with vast-right-wing-conspiracy progenitor Rupert Murdoch. Bill Clinton broke bread with Richard Mellon Scaife, who devoted a chunk of his fortune to destroying the Clintons in the 1990s—and nearly succeeded. And they've also shown a remarkable ability to grant indulgences to people who make nasty remarks about their only child. Remember John McCain's 1998 joke about Chelsea being so ugly because her father was Janet Reno? McCain apologized for this bit of straight talk, and the two senators have since bonded over shots of vodka in Estonia.
So, why are the Clintons, who have always excelled at burying the hatchet, now trying to bury it between my friend's shoulder blades? Well, it's a lot easier to be a mensch when you're winning than when you're losing. Consider, again, the context. On Tuesday, Clinton and Obama fought to a draw in the primaries. Then came news that while Obama had raised $32 million in January, Hillary had been forced to loan her campaign $5 million, and that senior aides were working for free. (Hillary has since reported a $10 million month.) On Saturday, as the candidate was signing her name to a memo declaring Shuster beyond the pale of forgiveness, Obama was eating Hillary's lunch in Washington, Louisiana, and Kansas, and the Clinton campaign was shaking up its top ranks. Another butt-kicking in Maine followed. In recent weeks, umbrage has joined inevitability and experience as a recurring Clinton motif. And Shuster's misuse of a bit of slang has functioned as a heaping portion of that umbrage.
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Sorry to interrupt the Chelsea thread, but onward, for a moment. Last week, my book group was lucky enough to host Carol Gilligan. Normally our meetings are cozy and humble; this time we were cozy and grand. Carol talked about her new novel, Kyra. I confess I haven't finished the book (the group is also very forgiving). But it was really a thrill to listen to a highly respected researcher talk about hurling herself over the fiction cliff. That is quite a risk, and Carol surely did not need to take it. And yet she did, with gusto, going so far as to take an introductory fiction writing class and to fall in love with her characters to the point that she expected to run into them when she had dinner recently at a Cambridge restaurant they go to in the book.
Inevitably, the conversation turned to the election. Carol, who is a Hillary supporter, made the same observation that you made, Meghan: When Hillary said she found her voice, she really did; in that moment, the timber and resonance or her speech was deeper and richer. Coming from the author of In a Different Voice, that's powerful confirmation.
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