I was watching a video of Sen. Hillary Clinton the other night on The New York Times website as she laid out her health care plan for America. The status quo is not merely inefficient, she said, but it simply cannot be sustained, even in the near future. As little as I know about how our national health insurance (or lack thereof) works, I, as a political junkie, still felt a certain glow from the screen: finally, a moment for Hillary to be herself.
It was a moment where I could calm down after an occurrence earlier that afternoon, when I watched this same Clinton pathetically trying to square her harrowing, hail-of-bullets-ravaged “memory” of landing in Bosnia in 1996, when readily-available video footage shows her chilling with 6-year-olds on the freaking tarmac. But in the present, she keeps telling her made-up story. I thought, if she is going to bother lying about this, can she at least be a little less obvious about it?
The junior senator from New York, whom I had the pleasure of voting into a second term in 2006 by virtue of a solid record and no discernible opponent, is indeed the most “polarizing” political figure in America, because she polarizes me.
At any given moment of the day, I am put in awe of her expertise and sheer grit on the national stage, only to be thrown right back into the “anyone but Hillary” basket whenever she makes herself victim to the good-old-fashioned Clintonism, made famous by her husband. That of straining logic and reality to the point of utter, hair-shredding madness. You want to tell her how very wrong she is, but as soon as you try, you find yourself babbling incoherently and frothing at the mouth.
They tried to warn us, back home when she was running for her second Senate term: “Whatever you do, don’t vote for Hillary. She’s just going to run for president.” And we shrugged it off: “Heck, let her. She can’t be any worse than what we have now.”
Then she went on NPR last month and explained that she rightly deserves the delegates from the “fair” Michigan primary, despite her written agreement that the contest wouldn’t count and the rather important fact that opponents Barack Obama and John Edwards had removed their names from the ballot on account of the aforementioned “not counting” thing. I’ve brazenly sidestepped the rules had I agreed to — now give me my delegates. Who does this crazy lady think she is?
I wonder, how a single person inspires such revulsion in otherwise-rational people like me? Politicians lie and distort around the clock. It’s their job, and we are all used to it. So why does my blood boil especially hot for the former first lady?
Perhaps a better question is: Why do voters keep asking her back? Any other candidate trailing in a presidential primary by her margin would’ve been run out on a rail by now. Do you suppose we, as Americans, secretly admire politicians who don’t adhere to the rules? Who take matters into their own hands just to show how gosh-durn much they love their country? Is Barack Obama a weenie for suggesting he should be the nominee because he has received the most votes? Wasn’t that Al Gore’s problem eight years ago?
There is something grandiose, scary and forever riveting about those Clintons, and I wish they would stop it. In the case of Hillary, there is a perfectly good candidate hidden under all that bitterness and triangulation — a candidate who could grab more than the requisite 50 percent-plus-one to win the whole thing if she really wanted to.
I think back to last fall, when she was Mrs. Inevitable, and being wholly impressed as I watched her in all those Democratic debates, wiping the floor with the likes of Joe Biden, Bill Richardson and yes, Obama. Her wonkiness, her absolute mastery of the minute details of domestic policy — as well as her careful, if disingenuous, nuances of foreign policy — brought me to respect her. She is, at long last, a very capable and passionate public servant.
Whatever happened to that woman? She was smart, she was shrewd and she was savagely funny (her unguarded humor is one of her most underreported qualities). But now she has resorted to making me detest her very presence on the TV screen, as she has done to roughly half of America. We simply don’t want her in that Oval Office chair. It’s that mysterious something about her tactics that is exhausting, nauseating and completely unacceptable.
But if she loses this year and instead runs for a third Senate term in 2012, she can count on receiving my vote.