“She is running against what she might have become”
Hillary Clinton is getting the wrath of her own party’s activists who have had it with both Clintons and their operatives, whether she’s feeling it or not.
Here’s the rest of the pull-quote from this article in The Nation by Tom Hayden:
“Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.”
Recently, Barack Obama made controversial comments about bitter and angry people in the working middle-class. Looks like there are plenty of them in his own party, in both campaigns.
To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working-class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don’t recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.
And yet, Obama supporters are certainly circling the wagons tightly, and have been since the Pastor Wright eruption. Hayden’s piece here sounds passionate about his candidate, but…bitter and angry.
So the dirty laundry is coming out. Raise questions about Obama’s connection to the radical activist Bill Ayers?
Hillary is blind to her own roots in the sixties…She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an “unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged.” She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America…
Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Treuhaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others “tolerated communists”.
So there. But Hayden’s not done.
It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News and manipulating old Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos, are trying, at least unconsciously, to so damage Barack Obama that he will be perceived as “unelectable” to Democratic superdelegates. It is also clear that the campaign of defamation against Obama has resulted in higher negative ratings for Hillary Clinton. She therefore is threatening the Democratic Party’s chances for the White House, whether or not she is the nominee.
Since no one in the party leadership seems able or willing to intervene against this self-destructive downward spiral, perhaps progressives need to consider responding in the only way politicians sometimes understand. If they can’t hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama.
And commentaries like this one from Hayden are sending that message. But with the party leadership split between the candidates and indecisive about the role of Florida and Michigan, and superdelegates figuring more prominently by the day, there’s no way to tell right now how the message is being received. Except for the Clinton campaign, which doesn’t seem to be paying attention.
So, the excruciatingly long days will continue.
