In Defense of Hillary

Oy. The presidential election is a year and a half away, and already I can't stand it. It's bad enough watching the wingnuts trying to decide who's the worst flip flopper among their oh-so-flip-floppy candidates. It's cringe-worthy to watch McCain making a serious run at the title. And tempting as it is to get seriously involved in the whole thing, I've been holding back. Until now.

God save me, I'm about to defend Hillary Clinton.

I used to love Hillary Clinton. She was so articulate, so capable, so knowledgeable. She spoke in full, clear paragraphs, totally off the cuff. This was when she was First Lady, and she was fantastic. She came to my alma mater to speak, and I sat in a bar to listen to her; the place was packed. I don't remember a word she said, except the general impression that it all made good sense, and that she was both personable and visibly, palpably smart.

Something has gone awfully wrong. And maybe part of it has gone wrong in Hillary -- she's human, after all, and as a human cannot possibly be immune to the pressure offered by her increased ambition and the near haloed status of her husband in comparison to her. She has a huge burden -- as the wife of a president that, let's face it, pretty much everyone to the left of the National Review desperately misses right now, and as a woman trying to stage herself for national office in the midst of a fucking cock-up of a disastrous war. She's certainly not the Hillary I remember....

But that's just it. I think she probably is the Hillary I remember, just not as I remember her. Those were comfortable times, and the rhetoric was different, no matter who was spinning it. I think a big part of the Hillary problem right now is that the kinds of things she has to talk about are not what she talked about in 1994, but it's not clear that, if you'd asked, she'd have said anything very different then.

She was always hawkish. She always preferred executive authority to congressional. She always was moderate in her social ideology. This is who she is, and was; but the communication of it now is coming through this national security lens that skews the entire picture. And the problem, clearly, is her Iraq war vote.

The Iraq war vote is devestating -- if you believe, as everyone seems to, that it was a vote of political expediency in the first place, now being defended in a second and even more hypocritical action of political expediency. It is fashionable on the Left right now to pretend that if only she would apologize, she would be forgiven. But I think Hillary actually is the Hillary I remember, and she's too smart for that shit. She knows perfectly well that no forgiveness will be granted from the Left, and a new rain of hypocrisy accusations will fall from the Right. Which makes it six of one/half dozen of the other -- except for the fact that, in all honesty, I don't think her Iraq vote was a matter of political jockeying, or at least not demonstrably so. I used to think so, but then I examined my own assumptions, and realized I'd been suckered by my own partisanship.

Why assume Hillary knew the Iraq war was a crock of shit? She was a hawkish senator immediately post-9/11, one who felt that congress should defer to presidential authority. She's held that line, and the assumption is that she's done so in defense of her original vote -- but I tend to think she's done so, in the most cynical case, because that's how she thinks presidential authority ought to work, and she's married to one president and would like to become another herself. She's to the right of left. She's a centrist. And in other countries, she'd be a right-of-centrist. But that's not dishonest; it's who she is. Fight her on the merits of that political position if you're so inclined, but give her the credit of her convictions, which as far as I can see are perfectly clear.

My point here -- and brace yourselves, because I intend to harp on a lot more about this in the future -- is that we all need to be careful about how we talk about Hillary Clinton. We have a very murky idea of her, and into all the cracks of our misunderstanding creep the sexism. The most disgusting example of this right now is Andrew Sullivan, who's developing a seriously repulsive habit of invecting against her while saying that he doesn't know what bothers him about her, she just bothers him. Often, this criticism comes down to her voice, and method of delivery -- and, as Sullivan said the other day, the idea that if he has to see her on his TV for the next few years he'll kill himself.

Really? Presumably George W. Bush's voice struck Sullivan's ear euphoniously enough to win his endorsement in 2000; I can't find Sullivan's endorsement online, but I'll bet anything it mentioned some excellent personable quality that spoke of leadership potential. If Sullivan were to vote for someone whose voice he didn't like, could we maybe get a president who won't send us into a giant, multi-faceted national tailspin? Can we just once not be the dumbest, most shallow country on earth and listen to what a person says, and assess his or her record simply on its merit, and then make a decision? I'm not defending Hillary's Iraq war vote, and I'll happily argue her or anyone else on the wisdom of it -- but I sure as shit am defending her right to be viewed as a serious candidate, with a pretty goddamn consistent record, and the chops to be listened to, no matter how much you find her voice grates on you.

Think how much we women are sick of listening to men pompifying at us, and settle down for a good, long listen.