Being ruthless may backfire in the presidential race
By Jurek Martin
Published: March 11 2008 18:56
I have never bought into the right wing line that the Clintons were ruthless and amoral, willing to sell their grandmothers into slavery in order to obtain power.
But there have been moments recently, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign against Barack Obama has turned nasty, when I have wondered if there was something to it. Moreover, I have learned from email correspondence that I am far from alone. It is not just conservatives who loathe “Bill and Hillary” but members of their own party, too.
Maybe Samantha Power, Mr Obama’s former foreign policy adviser, crossed the line in telling a Scottish newspaper that Mrs Clinton was “a monster.” She was, and will be again, a public figure of substance and is held to a level of accountability not applicable to my email correspondents. I will reveal no identities but here is a sample of their views.
A naturalised American of British extraction living in the Rockies thinks that the Clintons, whom he describes as “without shame or scruples”, remind him of “the Militant Tendency Trots who infiltrated the Labour Party in the 1980s.” He likes the following denunciation by Christopher Hitchens.
“There’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power, who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who are just unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”
Allowing Mr Hitchens his hyperbolic literary license, there is a US expatriate living in Scandinavia who also has her “lines in the sand” without being vitriolic about it. They are Mrs Clinton’s vote to authorise war in Iraq and her implication that Mr Obama might be a closet Muslim. “It will be very difficult for me, a life long Democrat (quite life long) to vote for Senator Clinton.”
But a wise old trade lawyer in Washington, no fan of the Clintons, takes a longer view. He does not think they are particularly ruthless, not in comparison with the Kennedy brothers, who, he says, were ruthlessness incarnate, after their father.
“We are talking about the presidency of the United States of America. Three strong-willed talented and highly ambitious people want the job and have disposed of numerous opponents most of whom were similarly strong-willed, talented and ambitious.”
He recalls “the cardinal in southwest France who, when told it was difficult to identify specific Albigensian heretics, said ‘burn them all; God will recognise his own.’” It might, however, be a little extreme to burn Obama superdelegates at the stake.
For myself, I think there is no doubt she has hard men advising her, like Harold Ickes and Howard Wolfson, who are very good at what they do, including, if necessary, making the opposition swim with the fishes.
I also tend to draw a difference between Mrs Clinton and Mr Clinton. Whatever his manifold sins and talents, there is almost a lightness to his being that carries him through the worst of times, including his impeachment on charges that had nothing to do with the affairs of state (affairs by the head of state really are different).
He can be a hard man, too – once, in 1992 , commenting that if somebody is beating you over the head with a hammer you had better reach for the cleaver. He has done that on his wife’s behalf once or twice recently against Mr Obama to much controversy. But that is not normally his modus operandi.
Mrs Clinton does not possess that touch, at least not in public. There is a mechanical, driven quality to her that leaves the impression that her “human moments” (tearing up a little in New Hampshire, gracefully saying in one debate how “honoured” she was to share the stage with Obama) might be contrived. But her desire to be president is so palpable it resembles the shingles, enduring and uncomfortable, as I know only too well.
Possibly this reflects Mrs Clinton’s strong sense that she is entitled to be president, less by virtue of her surname, which presents dynastic problems, than of her sex and who she is. When riding high last year she seemed to be looking beyond the primaries and even the general election to how she would run the country.
Sideswiped by the Obama phenomenon she now knows that entitlement is not just a set-in-stone federal social programme but has to be fought for, by all means available. That explains the pure chutzpah of her suggestion that Mr Obama, while allegedly unqualified to be commander-in-chief, might make a good running mate on a dream ticket, headed, naturally, by herself.
It also explains her intent to fight for every super delegate to the party convention and to ensure that Michigan and Florida, which both held invalid primaries in January which she won, be represented in Denver at the Democratic convention, one way or the other. It is behind her big state versus little state argument and, if she cannot catch Obama in the delegate count, why victory in the popular vote, which is more within her reach, matters most.
But there is little she can do to win over those Democrats already deeply disenchanted with her, like my email correspondents, who will stay home or vote for the Republican foe, John McCain. If the army of Obama supporters does likewise, being ruthless and amoral may not be enough.
The Financial Times Limited 2008
-Quinn
