This won't exactly be a juicy, anti-Hillary post that will satisfy the right-wing palate. I don't even want to write about Hillary today. I was hoping to save Hillary for last in my series on the candidates. That approach would have encouraged people to keep reading as they asked in eager anticipation, "When's he going to get to Hillary?" Now, I'll be covering Hillary before I discuss (yawn) Bill Richardson. So why am I writing about Hillary today? Because it's her birthday. As I've said before, I try to be as time-appropriate as possible.
While this won't be the juiciest post on Hillary, rest assured: this will not be the last time that I write about the Senator from New York. She will most likely be the Democratic nominee in 2008, so I'll have plenty of opportunities to critique her every move.
What is it about Hillary that makes me shudder? Why do I grow visceral at the sound of her name? Well, I'll keep writing to see if something therapeutic can result.
Like many Americans, I first heard of Hillary in 1992, when Bill Clinton was running for President. During the primaries, I didn't really hate Bill Clinton, since he sounded rather conservative in comparison to the people he was up against (e.g., Tom Harkin, Jerry Brown). In fact, one of my staunchly conservative friends said at the time that Clinton was the only Democratic candidate who sounded "reasonable." At least Clinton supported middle-class tax cuts! But, as I learned over the course of the election, Clinton had a number of liberal, big government ideas. And, although I was still mad at Bush I for appointing a pro-choice Health and Human Services secretary and raising taxes, my Republican spirit got restored because the religious right dominated the 1992 Republican National Convention. And when Clinton chose the self-righteous, pompous Al Gore as his running mate, it became clear in my mind whom to support.
I'm not even sure if I knew about Hillary when all this was happening. At some point during the election, I learned that Clinton had an assertive wife who wanted to play a key role in his potential Administration. She was labeled a feminist, which didn't exactly resonate with me, a Phyllis Schlafly fan. I always pictured feminists as obnoxious women who hated men, supported abortion and gay marriage, opposed Christianity, and wanted to destroy the traditional family. I got annoyed because they acted as if they spoke for most American women, when actually the conservative Concerned Women for America outstripped the National Organization for Women in membership. Well, Hillary struck me as that sort of woman: what newly popular Rush Limbaugh was calling a "feminazi." Her Tammy Wynette remark didn't help her much in my eyes (not that she'd care), and Pat Buchanan's revelation of her anti-family positions confirmed to me that I didn't want her in the White House.
Add to that a characteristic that did not attract me: her smug arrogance. That's a trait that I associate with a lot of liberals. They think that their way is the only way to help the world, and that anyone who disagrees with them hates the poor, minorities, women, and children. They often assume that "idealism" means agreeing with them. I got tired of teachers urging us to be idealistic/liberal. I also didn't care much for my "idealistic" fellow students, who patted themselves on the backs for their idealism. Hillary seemed to epitomize what I disliked about liberals.
Today, I have the same reactions. Even when Hillary is right, she comes across as smug and condescending. I tend to agree with her foreign policy positions more than those of Obama, but her whole attitude is "I'm so much more intelligent than Barack. He obviously doesn't grasp the deep nuances that I do." On Larry King Live, she criticized George W. Bush for not being intellectually curious enough. Well, maybe the Bush Administration is not an academic BS session, as was the Clinton Presidency (which often talked and did nothing). My readers know that I dislike intellectual snobbery, and I see so much of that in liberals, especially Hillary Clinton.
I remember when she announced her candidacy from the Internet. She said, "Don't you think that Washington is pretty one-sided?" She meant that the government was too conservative. It looks like an innocent comment, but it made me mad. For one, conservatives had to wait years before they finally got a government that was remotely interested in their concerns. Democrats have dominated Congress far longer than Republicans, and the Supreme Court has only recently become somewhat conservative. Second, if Hillary wants to criticize "one-sided," then she should take a look at academia, the news media, and the entertainment industry. Those are the one-sided institutions. I wonder if she thought that her student activism days were one-sided, when many students and professors united behind socialism and repressive Communist regimes, intimidating those who did not agree. I know she looks with nostalgia on those days, as her support for a Woodstock museum demonstrates.
And then add to that her hypocrisy. Like a lot of liberals, she feels that the standards she applies to others do not apply to her. I'm serious in my characterization of liberals: they criticize Bush for things that Clinton also did, or they lambaste the tactics of conservative organizations (e.g., Operation Rescue) while ignoring the sinister actions of their own causes. They even have the audacity to criticize conservatives for inserting incivility and hate into political dialogue, when they show extreme hatred for President Bush. Of course, when they criticize us, they're standing for justice; when we criticize them, we're mean-spirited people on the quest for power. Huh huh. Whatever! Hillary exemplifies the liberal hypocrisy that I abhor. She excoriates Bush for the war, even though she voted to authorize it, using the same arguments that Bush did. She helped fire thousands of White House travel employees, but she thinks Bush is horrible for removing certain prosecutors.
The weird thing is that I would probably like her if she were on my side, though I wouldn't care for her role in certain scandals. And I was surprised to learn that she could have been on my side. She was a Goldwater girl in 1964, in a time when most people saw Goldwater as an extreme right-wing nut. If only she had continued down that path rather than allowing herself to be influenced by the self-righteous, extremely leftist, morally degenerate trends of the 1970's. We could have had an intelligent, resourceful woman in our camp!