'Stop Hillary!' Exclaims Harper's Magazine in Provocative Cover Story
Photo Credit: Image by Shutterstock, Copyright (c) Everett Collection
October 22, 2014 |
In November's Harper’s magazine, Doug Henwood, a longtime progressive economics writer, editor and publisher, takes a deep dive into Hill-and-Bill land and resoundingly bursts the bubble that’s now taking shape across America’s Democratic provinces.
His article, “Stop Hillary: Vote no to a Clinton Dynasty,” turns the notion that Hillary and the White House are an inevitable match made in heaven into a restive rejoinder filled with deflating details from the Clintons’ long careers in high offices.
“What Hillary will deliver, then, is more of the same. And that shouldn’t surprise us,” Henwood writes, saying the country would be far better served by anyone but Hillary the hawk, Hillary the centrist, Hillary the corporatist, and Hillary the appendage of Bill. “Today we desperately need a new political economy—one that features a more equal distribution of income, investment in our rotting social and physical infrastructure, and a more humane ethic. We also need a judicious foreign policy, and a commander-in-chief who will resist the instant gratification of air strikes and rhetorical bluster."
"Is Hillary Clinton the answer to these prayers?” Henwood asks, then answering, “It’s hard to think so, despite the widespread liberal fantasy of her as a progressive paragon, who will follow through exactly as Barack Obama did not. In fact, a close look at her life and career is perhaps the best antidote to all these great expectations.”
Harper’s and Henwood, to their credit, are trying to jump ahead of the curve and answer the most obvious question looming in American politics. That question is not, as posters from her rallies pose, "Are we ready for Hillary?" According to Henwood, it’s more like, “Really, Hillary? Really?” as he offer readers an answer filled with details we thought we had forgotten.
I covered the 2008 presidential campaign and saw Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, John McCain and Sarah Palin give many speeches in many red and blue states. Having been there, I don’t buy into a lot of Henwood’s characterizations, such as why people voted for Obama versus Hillary, or that the “quasi-official” case for Hillary in 2016 boils down to: “She has experience. She’s a woman, and it’s her turn.”
After years of the heavy-handed, "we won, we rule" presidency of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, a lot of reporters, myself included, agreed that Hillary gave far better speeches and knew the wheels of government more than her competition, including Obama. But Americans were weary of war and didn’t want a female Dick Cheney, which essentially was the management style she telegraphed. Obama’s moderation was untested, but welcome, after years of Bush-Cheney immoderation.
What Henwood doesn’t broach is whether her centrist version of “we win, we rule” might be the temperament that voters, including Democrats, will want in 2016. Instead, he turns to Clinton’s past to suggest what her presidency would be like.
For starts, her cardinal sin is essentially an old one and unforgiveable in leftist circles: she abandoned her more idealistic and progressive instincts in favor of mainstream centrism. It’s not just that she turned her back on the spirit of Bob Dylan, D.H Lawrence, Picasso, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other early inspirations, writes Henwood. More telling was that she wrote her Wellesley College thesis on activist Saul Alinsky, then refused a job offer to work with him, and within a decade of graduating from Yale Law School was practicing corporate law in Little Rock, including going after Alinsky-style organizers from ACORN (while Governor Bill targeted teacher’s unions).
We’re told that part of her move to Little Rock was she failed the Washington, D.C. bar exam. Ouch! Are we really ready for more details like that? We are reminded of ancient history like the Clintons' bad real estate investment in the Ozarks, a project known as Whitewater. As the project’s principals saw their house of cards collapse, Hillary found herself mired in an insanely messy conflict-of-interest swamp. Bill was governor. The lead investor put all of the money into a bank that was regulated by the state and soon failed. Hillary, the governor’s wife, was at a Little Rock law firm hired to protect the principals from prosecution and even billed 60 hours for her work with the client. “Yet Whitewater itself is of far less interest than how Hillary handled it: with lies, half-truths, and secrecy,” Henwood writes, claiming she brought those qualities to the White House, which combined with arrogance, led to the collapse of healthcare reform.
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