Dear Dr. Democrat:
What is your take on Hillary Clinton’s performance at the Democratic Convention last night?
Hoping for Hillary
Dear Hoping:
I think Hillary hit it out of the park last night. She certainly won me over. I’m prouder now of the vote I cast in February than any primary vote since 1976. I can’t resist indulging in momentary regret that she (or Biden or anyone with a record of playing hardball) is not the nominee, but I’m eager to do whatever I can to get Obama elected — or, more to the point, to see that McCain is soundly defeated.
The old line that Hillary wouldn’t have gotten this far if she hadn’t been Bill’s wife is a utter fiction. Bill Clinton would be the first to agree that he would have never been elected president without Hillary, so she has as much right to benefit from that success as anyone.
She got into Yale law without Bill Clinton, and Sen. Sam Ervin hired her to be on the Democrat’s Watergate legal team without Bill. She was seriously reluctant to go with Bill back to Arkansas, but once there went to work in corporate law to pay the bills while he sought very low-paying jobs as Arkansas’ attorney general for one term and governor (which paid about $35k per year, if memory serves). While he was gov, she really did reform Arkansas’ educational system and became a popular first lady in an environment that was generally toxic for Dems.
She endured lacerating criticism when they entered the national stage in ‘92 that she was micromanaging his campaigns — an allegation that was fictionalized by Joe Klein in the book and movie “Primary Colors.” If even half of it is true, she did what testosterone-equipped leading lights like Bob Shrum, John Kerry and Al Gore could not do: she beat the Republicans in national elections twice, and did it dancing backwards and in a pantsuit and flats. So to have that accomplishment taken away from her now is just anti-factual.
She then took heat for being the first first lady to move her office into the West Wing, and she took an active role in the government, albeit behind the scenes because the GOP was hounding her day in and day out. She withstood their baseless, politically motivated persecution on Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, You-name-it-gate and the suicide of her friend Vince Foster, as well as her husband’s public humiliation of her, without ever crying or even showing emotion in public, which I can say hands down I could not have done.
Rightwingers like to say she wouldn’t have been elected to the Senate if Bill hadn’t been impeached for lying about Monica. I was paying close attention to that first Senate campaign and she beat Rick Lazario like a drum, and she did it by hard work, going into the Republican enclaves in upstate New York and winning over blue-collar voters. If her previous job had been astronaut, city council member or housewife, what difference would it have made? I think just as credible a hypothetical could be made that if Bill hadn’t been needlessly impeached, she’d be the nominee in the race to replace President Gore right now.
If Hillary can bring home 90 percent of her disgruntled fans — who say what they object to now is constant trashing of Hillary, not by Obama, but by his supporters (a whine that Maddow aptly labeled as “post-rational”) — she can bump up Obama’s numbers by at least a point or two. And since McCain was GAINING in the Gallup daily tracking poll as of yesterday, which is unheard-of when the other party’s convention is underway, Obama could use all the help he can get.
