Another Reference to Hillary's 800-lb Gorilla

[Corlyss_D]

The American Debate | Clinton fatigue may not be thing of the past
And the senator's efforts to dampen criticism and control the Bill-and-Hillary narrative aren't going to work.
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Political Analyst

The Clintons want to party like it's 1992.

Back at the dawn of their excellent adventure, Hillary would tell voters that she and her husband were a package deal, two for the price of one. And when they found themselves under attack - thanks to his military draft avoidance and bimbo eruptions - they hunkered in their bunker ("the war room," as Hillary dubbed it) and toughed it out together.

Even though the roles are reversed this time - with Bill angling for the job of First Gentleman - the deal is basically the same. They're offering eight more years of the Clinton family brand, and all the potential baggage that goes with it. Bill in particular is both asset and albatross, and both spouses are magnets for partisan flak (even from disillusioned comrades, such as liberal Hollywood mogul David Geffen). Which means that Hillary's only option is to try to sell all this tumult as a good thing. The success of her candidacy may well hinge on her powers of persuasion.

On the stump in early primary states, she says of the Republicans: "I'm the only person they're most afraid of, because Bill and I know how to beat them, and we have consistently... . I know how to fight back." When she floats that argument, virtually touting the virtues of rapid response, I hear uneasy applause. She is essentially promising eight more years of polarized politics in Washington.

But I sense that many Democrats aren't necessarily sold on the idea of extending the war-room ethos into 2016, and that creates a potential opening for a rival (perhaps Sen. Barack Obama) savvy enough to suggest, without getting personal, that Clinton fatigue should remain a malady of the late '90s.

Amid all the talk about the potential milestones in the '08 race - the first major female candidate, the first major black candidate - we often overlook the historic Bill factor. Never before has an ex-president auditioned for the role of White House spouse. This is a complicating factor that delights the many Democrats who associate Bill with the pre-9/11 peace-and-prosperity era. But a sizable share of Democrats yearn to turn the page. I hear that some Democrats only half-jokingly liken Bill to The Thing That Wouldn't Leave, a John Belushi character on Saturday Night Live who parked himself on people's sofas, stayed all night, and ate everything in sight.

The significance of David Geffen's outburst - 11 days ago, he called the Clintons nimble liars who don't stand for anything, and he implied that Bill is still catting around - is that he said in public what a lot of Democrats mutter in private. One party strategist, who does not work for Hillary, told me that she would like to put Bill "in a cage somewhere, with a blanket thrown over it." These Democrats fret that Hillary's tepid poll ratings (in the latest ABC News-Washington Post survey, 48 percent of Americans view her unfavorably) are partly attributable to public concerns about another package deal.

Those concerns may well persist, because nobody knows the terms of the deal. Would Bill function as First Adviser? Would he agree not to upstage her, by staying out of the limelight that he loves? Would she agree not to make decisions that would benefit his global initiatives? Would she risk her presidential standing to defend him again if he does something to embarrass her? The terms of the deal are inextricably tied to the nuances of their personal relationship, and even those who know the relationship won't talk about it. As a Hillary adviser recently told an inquiring Newsweek reporter, "If that's what you want to talk about, I'm hanging up right now."

Team Hillary's rapid response to Geffen also serves as a warning to all who might seek in the future to criticize the Clintons, or simply raise questions. The Hillary camp assailed Geffen's remarks as epitomizing "the politics of personal destruction" and demanded that Obama denounce Geffen and return the money Geffen had just raised for his campaign. In essence, Hillary was spreading the word that she deems all criticism of the Clinton couple to be off-limits in this presidential campaign. That's a pretty broad decree, and nervy as well; presumably, it means that Obama would be practicing the politics of personal destruction if he again contends (as he did last October) that Bill is "trapped by his own biography."

Hillary's concern is understandable, up to a point. Some of the usual suspects on the right are reportedly gearing up for a fresh round of Bill-and-Hillary-bashing, aided this time by Dick Morris, the ex-Clinton pollster dumped by the First Couple in 1996, when he was found to be cavorting with a hooker. And the cable TV shout-fests are thirsting for raw meat; witness this series of questions and comments from Chris Matthews a few weeks ago, as he queried Hillary aide Ann Lewis: "Is Bill Clinton going to be a problem in this campaign?... . Is he going to behave himself?... Is he going to behave himself?... Is he going to behave himself, not cause a publicity that gets her embarrassed?... So he's going to behave himself... . I think it'd be great for the country if we were not once again distracted... . "

But it's Hillary who has put the Clintons in play. She typically praises her husband's presidency, and her campaign has coached Hillary fans to deliver the same message to skeptics and inquiring reporters; for instance, in a February memo, supporters in Iowa were told to say this: "A lot of Americans will gladly take the eight great years of economic prosperity and peace that the Clinton administration delivered."

In other words, Hillary herself has made Bill fair game. It strains credulity to think that she can police the campaign discourse, that she can publicly extol his positives without taking heat from rivals and critics about his negatives. Nor does her censorious stance benefit her image, since she is already widely viewed, perhaps unfairly, as a humorless control freak.

As Democratic-friendly blogger Mickey Kaus said the other day on his Slate-sponsored site, "Enforcing taboos doesn't work like it used to" before the invention of the Internet. "Today, if people have things to say, they're going to say them. If the candidates don't say them, and the [mainstream media don't] say them, that doesn't mean they won't get said... . [Hillary's] fellow Democrats are tolerant, but they wonder what the deal [with her husband] is. That isn't the 'politics of personal destruction.' It's due diligence."

Hillary would prefer that Bill work his political wiles behind the scenes; indeed, he has been tapped by her team to host a series of small, private events with elite donors, feeling their pain for six-figure gain. But she won't be able to control the story, because Geffen has given voice to those in her party who still feel fatigued by the late '90s - including Marty Peretz, longtime Democratic activist and proprietor (until recently) of The New Republic magazine, who wrote the other day: "I believe that deep down the country agrees with Geffen. It does not want to relive the Clinton years."

There are still a lot of Democrats who remember how they were compelled to defend Bill's lies during the Lewinsky affair; who remember that he had promised to run "the most ethical administration in history"; who remember how he left office by pardoning a rich tax felon who had donated generously to Clinton causes and whose ex-wife happened to be one of Hillary's pals. These Democrats have no interest in another package deal, or a Clinton family dynasty. They have wanted to fight the Clintons for a long time. Hillary can win this fight, but she cannot suppress it.

Contact Dick Polman at dpolman@phillynews.com or see his blog at http://go.philly.com/polman.

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news ... 827642.htm

[jbuck919]

I don't usually do this, but I thought Corlyss would appreciate something from the NY Times that she will not see fit to dismiss out of hand.

Copyright The New York Times 2007

By PATRICK HEALY
Published: March 4, 2007

O.K., so Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton won’t accede to demands from some Democrats to apologize for her 2002 vote authorizing military action in Iraq.

I’m Sorry, I’m Sorry, I’m Sorry ... But that doesn’t mean she has an allergy to apologizing.

She just does it in her own, very Hillary way, as a review of her apologies shows.

Mrs. Clinton can be rather artful, for instance, at turning around her apologies to generate sympathy for herself. During her husband’s campaign against President George H. W. Bush in 1992, amid the Gennifer Flowers fracas, Mrs. Clinton casually mentioned to a journalist rumors that Mr. Bush had engaged in extramarital “carrying on.” She soon paid penance for her gossiping this way:

“It was a mistake. People were asking me questions at the time and I responded. But nobody knows better than I the pain that can be caused by even discussing rumors in private conversation, and I did not mean to be hurtful to anyone.”

Said Mary Matalin, a Bush campaign aide at the time: “They call that an apology?”

Self-deprecation is another trademark. After a head-shaker of a line in 2004 — that Gandhi used to run a gas station in St. Louis — she poked at herself by saying: “I have admired the work and life of Mahatma Gandhi. I truly regret if a lame attempt at humor suggested otherwise.”

Like many talented politicians, on matters of state — such as the 1994 defeat of the health care reform effort she led — her admission of error can be so nuanced that listeners may wonder if an apology was really her point.

“I’m not bitter,” she said in the fall of 1994. “We made mistakes. But I actually feel good about the way we ended up. We got people talking about national health care. People say, ‘Don’t give up.’ So I won’t.”

Thus, people who say that Senator Clinton is too self-righteous to admit fault on Iraq are at least half-wrong. There are plenty of examples of her saying she was wrong. And sometimes she does it quickly, as she did in 1992 to the country singer Tammy Wynette, famous for the 1969 hit, “Stand by Your Man,” after saying that she was not “some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.”

She can also drag her heels on admitting a mistake — and has regretted it. She says in her autobiography that she did not appreciate the political toll of the Whitewater scandal, and that, as a result, public relations mistakes were made. At a Whitewater news conference in 1994, she said that one of her biggest regrets was that her reluctance to provide information to the news media had fed an image that she was hiding something.

Some of her Democratic rivals are thirstily trying to make a character issue out of her refusal to apologize on Iraq. Twice in the last two weeks, former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, has said that voters want a president “to tell the truth when you believe you have made a mistake,” as he put it during a visit to New York.

But beyond the fact that Mrs. Clinton says she has nothing to apologize for, she knows, as with Whitewater, that apologizing in the midst of political warfare is risky. Indeed, she has said that she is willing to lose voters rather than make an apology she does not believe in.

“In politics, people demand an apology from an opponent in order to humiliate them,” said Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown who has written on apologies.

Many Americans don’t love leaders who apologize willy-nilly. In 2004, voters chose a Republican for president who stood his ground on the war against all critics instead of a Democrat who sounded apologetic when he said that he voted for $87 billion in troop funding before he voted against it.

And President Clinton was derided in some quarters as the apologizer in chief, not just for personal foibles (see Lewinsky, Monica) but for a whole history book of national wrongs (from the slave trade to Rwanda).

Graham Dodds, a political scientist at Concordia University in Montreal, who has studied political apologies, said of Mrs. Clinton, “She comes from a household that is well versed in the art of political apology, and, I’m sure, knows the risks in coming off as overly apologetic.” .

On foreign affairs, beyond Iraq, Mrs. Clinton hasn’t been much of a target for apology-seekers. She speaks with precise care on national security matters.

In a review of her history of apologizing, only one mea culpa on the international stage stands out: That she did not immediately reject remarks by Suha Arafat, wife of the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat, at a joint event where Mrs. Arafat suggested that Israel had used poison gas to control Palestinians. Mrs. Clinton denounced the remark a day later, saying she had gotten an incomplete translation.

Conventional wisdom holds that a commander in chief cannot look weak, and a female candidate for the office faces an even stricter standard for toughness.

“We’re a very macho culture, and I think every women in public office has to find her path to negotiate that,” Ms. Tannen said. “To the extent she’s a woman and has to prove she’s tough, standing her ground is the best thing to do. And to the extent she’s a woman and people don’t tolerate toughness in women, she’s going to be faulted for that.”

Professor Tannen sees four elements to a good apology: You admit fault; you express regret; you acknowledge the damage done; and you either promise to make amends, or promise not to make the same mistake again.

On the matter of her 2002 Iraq vote, Senator Clinton has put the fault on President Bush. She has expressed regret that he used the 2002 Senate vote as a means for war, acknowledged that the war was poorly conducted, and promised that she would not vote the same way again. Not exactly a rationale for an apology.

In this regard, Professor Dodds said, she is more like President Bush than her husband.

“It’s a hallmark of Bush that he sticks to his guns no matter what,” Mr. Dodds said. “If she were to apologize now, she would open herself up to the charge of flip-flopping.”

Phony apologies, too, can easily fail the smell test. So do half-way admissions of remorse.

“The thing about an apology is that it can make powerful people look weak, such as if Hillary admitted mistakes on Iraq and Democrats didn’t accept that,” Mr. Dodds said. “An apology does not always work.”

[Corlyss_D]

a political scientist at Concordia University in Montreal, who has studied political apologies

Wow! Talk about a lacuna of historical studies.