red states rule
04-08-2008, 08:03 AM
In just a few months the left has turned on the Clinton's with the same distain they show Republicans
It is fun to watch the same liberals who told us what poitical genius's the Clintons were, are now telling us how they are destroying the Democrat party
Falling Out of Love With Bill
Could Democrats and Republicans be finding new common ground—in seeing the ugly truth about their erstwhile heroes?
snip
For me the clarifying moment of disgust was his dishonesty concerning one of Barack Obama’s refreshing moments of truth-telling. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,” Obama told a newspaper editorial board, “in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. [Reagan] put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think the Republican approach has played itself out, [but] I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there.”
Bill (and Hillary) Clinton distorted and demagogued this bit of plain truth to try to cast Obama as some kind of crypto-Republican. The former president has since gone on to besmirch Obama as a merely black candidate (“Jesse Jackson [also] won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88”) and as less patriotic than his wife and John McCain (“two people who love this country”).
Bill may believe sincerely that Hillary would make the better president. However, I agree with the suggestion that what’s driving him is not so much spousal loyalty as his own desperate narcissism, less a determination to get Hillary in the White House than to keep Obama out of it. How dare Obama say, he whined, that Reagan “had a more lasting impact on America than I did”? Indeed, an Obama presidency would be an unacceptable affront to Bill Clinton’s sense of his own historic gloriousness, for Obama is the new, highly improved version of Bill Clinton. Like Clinton in 1992, Obama is the thoughtful, oratorically brilliant 46-year-old new-style progressive who seems more pragmatist than ideologue. Whereas Clinton in 1998 was called “the first black president” in a metaphorical, mack-daddy sense—for his pleasure-loving appetites that had run afoul of the Man—Obama would be the post-ironic real thing. Obama’s speech about race was, among other things, a sublime and successful feat of political triangulation—which no doubt redoubled Clinton’s jealousy about the new guy’s stealing his act.
http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/45783/
It is fun to watch the same liberals who told us what poitical genius's the Clintons were, are now telling us how they are destroying the Democrat party
Falling Out of Love With Bill
Could Democrats and Republicans be finding new common ground—in seeing the ugly truth about their erstwhile heroes?
snip
For me the clarifying moment of disgust was his dishonesty concerning one of Barack Obama’s refreshing moments of truth-telling. “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America,” Obama told a newspaper editorial board, “in a way that Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. [Reagan] put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think the Republican approach has played itself out, [but] I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there.”
Bill (and Hillary) Clinton distorted and demagogued this bit of plain truth to try to cast Obama as some kind of crypto-Republican. The former president has since gone on to besmirch Obama as a merely black candidate (“Jesse Jackson [also] won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88”) and as less patriotic than his wife and John McCain (“two people who love this country”).
Bill may believe sincerely that Hillary would make the better president. However, I agree with the suggestion that what’s driving him is not so much spousal loyalty as his own desperate narcissism, less a determination to get Hillary in the White House than to keep Obama out of it. How dare Obama say, he whined, that Reagan “had a more lasting impact on America than I did”? Indeed, an Obama presidency would be an unacceptable affront to Bill Clinton’s sense of his own historic gloriousness, for Obama is the new, highly improved version of Bill Clinton. Like Clinton in 1992, Obama is the thoughtful, oratorically brilliant 46-year-old new-style progressive who seems more pragmatist than ideologue. Whereas Clinton in 1998 was called “the first black president” in a metaphorical, mack-daddy sense—for his pleasure-loving appetites that had run afoul of the Man—Obama would be the post-ironic real thing. Obama’s speech about race was, among other things, a sublime and successful feat of political triangulation—which no doubt redoubled Clinton’s jealousy about the new guy’s stealing his act.
http://nymag.com/news/imperialcity/45783/