On Monday, Jane Smiley over on Huffington Post provided an excellent argument as to why a McCain-Hillary ticket is what the Hillary campaign will devolve into should she lose the Democratic nomination. It is the logical course given their hawkish compatibility on foreign policy and Clintons’ history of compromising Democratic principles for political expediency.
It’s become clear over the last week that the more Hillary Clinton is pressed, the more she reveals her true self. The fact that this self is unscrupulous is bad enough, but the fact that her whole campaign for the last year has been predicated on positioning, spin, and other varieties of public relations is worse. In fact, it is not only worse, it is Bushian, and that is the worst.
One tactic Hillary’s campaign managers landed upon is sucking up to Republicans and spelling out similarities between Clinton and cheerleader-for-war McCain. Back in the 90s, during the Reagan Devolution, triangulation was the only way Bill Clinton could get anything done, and so he did it, going well beyond Republican expectations: welfare reform, small government, proCorporate agenda (NAFTA), minimal social programs, and so forth. As unscrupulous as she is, Hillary is now willing to go far beyond such compromises to satisfy her personal ambition.
According to Jane Smiley.
Hillary Clinton seems to have learned the wrong lesson from her Senatorial success. The lesson she has learned is that Republicans such as McCain are more her friends than Senators with progressive principles. As a result, it now appears that Clinton and McCain stand together on one side of a divide, and Barack Obama stands on the other side of that divide. The divide is between the inside-the-beltway ruling class, who can see no reason of any kind that they should give up the power they have accumulated and the avenue to wealth that it represents, and the citizenry of the country, who in every poll insist that the country is headed in the wrong direction. In the last week, Clinton has put herself on McCain’s ticket, attacking the change that Obama promises and seems poised to deliver (whether or not he can remains an open question), and promising more more more of the same of what we have had for the last thirty years. More of the same is exactly what almost everyone does not want, but Clinton tells us everyday in every way that that is what we will get — what we have had is what she touts as her “experience”. What we see in her campaign is that we will get the same old same old with an added measure of chaos.
Clinton, of course, is not Cheney. Dick Cheney is the mad master of corruption, a person who literally doesn’t know what integrity is. But Hillary is too smart not to know, and she has made up her mind to shelve her integrity for the sake of ambition. And let me be clear what I mean by corruption — I have no idea what her financial gains have been over the years, and I don’t care. What I mean by corruption is any and all support of the criminal policies of the Republicans while calling herself a Democrat, in order to gain power.
(snip)
(The Clintons) are surrounded by advisors who both literally and figuratively are married to the Republicans. They are, indeed, now part of the “vast right wing conspiracy”.
One of the key questions about the Democrats since the 2006 elections is, where do their loyalties really lie? Time and again they have failed to stop the Republicans, or settled for a little populist embroidery around the edges of policies that by and large serve to increase the power of the Republicans. Their excuse, which is growing thin, is that they don’t have the power to confront Bush. Hillary Clinton is now showing their real agenda — preserving the status quo at the expense of the military, the taxpayers, the economy, world peace, and the rule of law.
Should Hillary lose the Democratic nomination, therefore, look for a McCain-Hillary ticket. As the Republican VP candidate to aging McCain, she has a far better chance of finally attaining her goal, becoming the first woman president, than she would on an Obama ticket.