As someone who spent a decade and a half idolozing Hillary Rodham Clinton, and fiercely defending her from ridiculous and vicious right-wing smears, I've been reeling from a series of consecutive heartbreaks these past months. I've been devastated as she has crawled into bed with slime like Mark Penn, virtually campaigned for McCain, then assumed the very same empty, nasty, divisive right wing attack strategies so long and so unfairly leveled against herself and her husband.
Early in the campaign, Hillary's centrist and DLC tacking pushed me toward Edwards, but I was more than ready to stump for her in the general. But by now, I've been casting about for ways not to hate this woman with that special, thousand-white-hot-sun heat that only the faithful who've been jilted and betrayed can feel.
And I think I've found it.
For those others in my position, who once could only dream that Hillary might someday be a serious presidential candidate, who dutifully swallowed the bitter pills of NAFTA and the 1996 Telecom Act (neither of which Hillary opposed at the time), as well as Hillary's Iraq, Patriot Act and bankruptcy bill votes, trusting that she was just waiting for her moment and not really GOP-lite, perhaps you too have felt sucker-punched by Hillary's recent campaign choices. Perhaps, like me, you can't quite imagine how you might look past her shivving and shanking enough pull a lever for her, if it came to that.
Let us remember, though, that the Tonya Harding and kitchen sink treatment that Hillary is dishing out is kid gloves compared to what the GOP will do. Hillary may be scorched-earth, kamikaze campaigning as far as the Democratic party is concerned, but the fires of hell are the GOP's speciality.
The same swiftboaters who push-polled South Carolina in 2000 about McCain's "out-of-wedlock black baby," the same ones who called McCain "the canary" (because he was supposedly so eager to "sing" under interrogation, and eager to remain in Vietnam as an agent of the Viet Cong), the ones who called McCain "crazy" and "unstable" due to his years under torture--these are the cretins who will be turning their guns on Obama, if he is the nominee.
The GOP will not only play the predictable "elitist" card (with all the added punch of "uppity negro" subtext), they will ramp up the "Muslim" and "potential traitor" charges, they will call him a Marxist and a "snake oil" salesman and a Don King Rezko agent of smarm, and they will endlessly strike the Wright and Weather Underground chords. They may stage an October invasion of Iran. Whoever the Democratic nominee, we will see the filthiest, most malicious, evil campaign tactics from the GOP ever known to man.
And that is before the voting machines.
It is imperative that Obama continue to find ways to counter Hillary's lowest blows, and to practice fighting back hard without getting into the gutter himself. The high road is self-preserving in a Democratic race, but it will be the best tactic in the general as well, because for some reason the librul media will not brook anything nasty against their "maverick hero" McCain (shoot, they won't even report the fact that he still doesn't know Sunni from Shia).
Yes, we need to point it out when Hillary's attacks on Obama are outrageous and hypocritical (she's helped bust unions, she supported NAFTA, the bankruptcy bill, special deals with China, and the war, has taken lobbyist money from the worst corporate offenders, and acts like SHE'S the one who's had the workin' peoples' backs all along?). We can bemoan the fact that, when faced with GOP and GOP-lite, the voters go with GOP every time.
But Obama folks, because we need to not-hate Hillary, because we will ultimately need to rally behind her, either as Senator or Speaker or Secretary of State or presidential nominee, think of her as the harsh sensei, as the dirty-fighting scrimmage opponent, as the hurricane Wilma before hurricane Katrina.
She may not intend to be doing Obama any favors. But in the long run, she probably is.
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