Opinion> R Emmett Tyrrell> Hillary Was Born To Lose

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Hillary Was Born To Lose

WASHINGTON — I believe I made a mistake when I decided not to attend the Democratic National Convention. The consequence of that decision has been that I have had to watch its highlights on national television. There the media gaggle, with few exceptions, plangently has repeated — tediously and cheerlessly — many things that I know to be untrue. The pre-eminent untruth resounding across the airwaves is that the Clintons are political geniuses. They are to electioneering what Ludwig van Beethoven was to the piccolo or Slobodan Milosevic was to ethnic cleansing, to wit, consummate artists. Since the early 1990s, I sedulously have researched the Clintons' lives and work. My finding is that they are mediocrities in all things political, save one: huckstering. Moreover, they are accomplished hucksters solely because the media are composed of credulous ignoramuses. Do you think I am being ungentlemanly? I am not alone.

This week, after but two days of watching the media's coverage of the looming Democratic convention, columnist Tony Blankley — a gentleman to the utmost — coined the term "the mainstream moron media." My guess is that Blankley was perfectly serene when he typed out that line. Most probably, he was wearing an immaculately starched English shirt. Possibly, he was wearing a tie, and almost certainly, he had his pants on. But really , after two days of the media's homogenized mush, enough is enough. "When I turned the TV on," Blankley wrote at the outset of the convention coverage, "the political cable shows were filled with liberal pundits, liberal anchors, liberal guest historians, liberal weather gals and guys, liberal news-you-can-use chicks and liberal political 'strategists' (i.e., out-of-work former Democratic National Committee gofers)." Practically everything they droned on about was stupid.

Blankley was particularly critical of the blah, blah, blah that followed the Prophet Obama's choice of Sen. Joe Biden as his running mate in their Campaign for Change. Joe is a minor Washington monument, complete with a stone head. He has been a senator for 36 years. He may have been a congressional page during the administration of Grover Cleveland. Yet the mainstream moron media were in the raptures over the Prophet's bold choice.

Of course, I share Blankley's derision for the Biden edition of the Media Follies, but it is their ongoing enthusiasm for the Clintons that strikes me as most derisible.

Hillary just lost a presidential bid considered for months to have been "inevitable" (though I always had my doubts, as you will recall), and she lost to a political neophyte, a neighborhood organizer from Chicago. By the end of the first month of the primaries, she had blown through $100 million. She was doomed by Feb. 5. During her extended soap opera, she was personally indecisive (as was predictable), presided over a chaotic and embittered staff (again, predictable), and had no control of her reckless husband (stupendously predictable), who, contrary to what the mainstream moron media say, almost never has been an asset for any candidate he's supported. In 2004, he campaigned for 14 candidates, 12 of whom lost — but I repeat myself.

Sen. Clinton never really had much of a chance, though you never will hear this from the mainstream moron media. Her negatives were always more than 40 percent. They were at 48 percent when I last reported on them. No candidate has ever won the nomination with such high negatives. Nor has a candidate won the nomination with such a string of scandals appearing on the public record. Think of her missing Whitewater billing records, her cattle futures skullduggery, Filegate, Travelgate, claims by a previous independent counsel that she was "less than truthful" under oath, the trashing of the White House as she left in January 2001, the missing White House property she had to return or make restitution on, the last-minute presidential pardons and her brothers' roles in them.

For that matter, think of the early stages of her campaign this year: repeated dirty tricks against Obama, dubious campaign contributions from shadowy Chinese sources, her husband ham-fistedly raising questions of race. Now there is all this residual animosity against the nominee who won fairly, Sen. Barack Obama. Huckster that she is, Hillary played to the basest instincts of her supporters, the women of the fevered brow (feminists) and the men of the slightly rubicund neck (hicks).

My Democratic friends, you all will be better off when these shameless opportunists are in retirement.

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator, a contributing editor to The New York Sun, and an adjunct scholar at the Hudson Institute. His newest book is "The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House." To find out more about R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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Mr. Tyrrell, your review of the Hillary campaign misses one facet that is of some significance for the nation.

For at least some Democrats, rather than the primaries being a choice between cults-of-personality, they were about ideology, and to a lesser extent one's faith that one's selection could implement. Some of Hillary's supporters, based on her history and that of her husband, perceive her as having a moderate ideology, whatever positions she put forth while attempting to get the left-tilted Democratic Party's nomination. Those individuals likely see Barack as representing the left wing of Democratic thinking. Thus the primary campaign for those Dems was an ideological contest. Compared to the broadly pundit-espoused view that intransigent Hillary supporters are either racists or selfish brats, this much better explains the difficulty that the Barack phalanx and Hillary-the-leader are having in convincing those individuals to switch their support to Barack, at least for those observers with a smattering of historical awareness.

*If* one believes that the national sense of wellbeing is maximized when government operates somewhere near the ideological center, at least in regard to issues where a moral issue isn't non-negotiable, then it was unfortunate for the nation that the Democratic moderates lost.

Comment: #1
Posted by: JWilly48519
Fri Aug 29, 2008 12:48 PM