Hillary, Bill was right it does matter what the meaning of the word is is

I realize it may seem that people pick on Hillary quite a lot and that Hillary's supporters got upset about that. I also realize that a lot of people who come here lurk before they feel safe and confident enough to decide to throw their virtual hats into the pond. It can be quite a frightening experience to decide to make a post, especially one that the community does not like because people can get diwnright rude. BTW if anybody decides this is a troll post, there was a great recipe for black bean chile published in the Times in 1988 and if anyone knows it could they please post it here. This introduction really does not have a lot to do with the main part of the post, but I lost that damned recipe years ago and it really was a good Chile. To get serious I would like to explain why I decided to start putting in my two cents and what I think it says about the Clinton campaign.

By way of introduction, I should state upfront that I am an immigrant who has grown up in a political world defined mostly by mediocre leaders a dashed dreams. I grew up in Britain in the aftermath of the 1960s. The first political event I can remember was the death of Churchill. By the time I was a teenager, the Conservatives were in power, and Britain was pretty much a third world country that had a three day working week and had to get bailed out by the IMF. By the end of the 1970s Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and it sucked so I left.

I eventually came to the states. I lived through most of Reagan's presidency, both Bush's and Clinton. While Clinton was the best of this bad batch, to describe his presidency as the progressive moment we had all hoped for in 1992 is a stretch of the truth at best.

Sadly, the Clinton Presidency can only be measured against the base line of his predecessors and succesors and so the bar does not have to be set very high. Yes I know we lived through an unprecedented bubble and the budget was balanced, but remember Bill said at the moment the bubble was taking off that he had heard the clarion call of the right and accepted that big government was over. Straight afterward, the internet boom hit and the information superhighway turned into a river of gold, none of which would have been possible if it had not been for the actions of an interventionist government in the first place

Within two years of big government being over Clinton had presided over the telecommunications reform of 1996, welfare reform and the freedom to farm the repercussions of which can be felt to this day, especially by those families Obama was addressing in his comments in San Francisco last week and in Indiana over the last two days. Without an activist government, looking out for the needs of workers and poor people, you get awful trade bills, increases in poverty and a soundtrack dominated by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.

Finally a candidate comes along who is the closest thing to a progresive I have seen in my lifetime. What makes it even weirder he is younger than me. The night Clinton won for the first time I was overjoyed not because he ha become President, but because it meant Bush would no longer be President and we would finally be free of having to listen to Bill Bennett, Dan Quayle and Gary Bauer, a particularly ugly and self-righteous little bastard. The night Obama wins I am looking forward to taking part in a massive block party here in West Philadelphia.

Little did I know the Republicans would sweep to power, in large part because of Clinton's unwillingness to take a stand on anything but the North American Free Trade Agreement and his wife's failure to come up with universal health care. What followed was retreat after retreat as Clinton abandoned any pretense of an agenda at the same time as he triangulate his way back into the White House at the same time as Cable News offered us an irrelevant diet of bullshit narrated by Quayle, Bauer and Bennet. Yuck

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While I realize my indictment of Bill's presidency is a little harsh, it is hard to look back after months of Primaries and remember why one bothered to defend him so vigorously during the impeachment. That having been said, what does the first Clinton Presidency have to say about what a Hillary Presidency would be like. One only need to think of Mark Penn,  to realize it would be more triangulation only with fewer resources.

Mark Penn is illustrative of a deeper and I think even more disturbing aspect of what a Clinton Presidency would be like. One thing Bill was good at was rearranging his ideology to fit the needs of the moment. Unfortunately, after forty years Hillary takes this praxis to its logical conclusion and rearranges her past to fit the needs of what she believes the audience wants. She will literally reinvent her self at the drop of a hat, so now she is the pinochle playing factory gal, who took her gun to church with her. When that no longer works, she attempts to hide behind a claim that she was tired., we should not look to the past for guidance, instead we should focus on the future.

In so doing, Hillary and her campaign embody all the worst aspects and characteristics of what Debord described as the developed spectacle. By claiming, as she did on NPR last week that she has been victimized and treated to a double standard she refused to define, Clinton has attempted to make herself and the Campaign impregnable and unanswerable. This, as Debord predicrted, has given

"What is false an entirely new quality. At a stroke it is truth which has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis. Unanswerable lies have succeeded in eliminating public opinion which first lost the ability to make itself heard and then quickly dissolved altogether.

The manufacture of a present ... which wants to forget the past and no longer  seems to believe in a future, is achieved by the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same short list of trivialities, passionately proclaimed as major discoveries. Meanwhile news of what is genuinely important, of what is actually changing, comes rarely, and then in fits and starts. (Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Thesis V)

One only need look at the trajectory of Obama's arguments these last few months and Clinton's responses to see how Debord's hypothesis plays out. First, Obama builds a campaign on the foundation of a yearning for an activist government that can only achieve what the constituents want if they are willing to pull together and pressure the government from below. To rely on any other model, Obama argues will leave power in the hands of those responsible for creating these unanswerable lies, thus the slogan "yes we can". Hillary attempted to dismiss this as sophomoric idealism, spouted by a candidate not ready to lead on day one.

When Barack was challenged to show how he could put his new politics into practice, over the past month, Obama has made two interesting moves that grow out of his earlier argument that nothing can change unless we force it too from below. He took on the bedrock of Clinton's supposed domestic experience, namely the excellent economy of the Clinton years, which she has touted as something we want to return to and argued this prosperity, because of history and a government that has not given as shit about the working poor, has not touched the lives of large swaths of the population. Barack is no longer a candidate imbued with sophomoric idealism and instead is an elitist who has nothing but contempt for the American people.

Here again Hillary is attempting to rewrite her own biography and history, by rewriting Obama's present, to prove she is most qualified to lead on day one. The sad thing is that there is no one in her orbit willing to reign her in.

Instead, she is surrounded by yes people and sycophants who are more than happy to enable her reconstruction. To illustrate this, I close to end with a quote from an article published in Salon earlier this week, that attempted to see how if at all Hillary was affected by the events of 1968:

That summer, Hillary accompanied House Republicans to the party convention in Miami Beach, where she staffed a Rockefeller for President suite. She was appalled by the nomination of her teenage political crush Richard Nixon, who was hustling the votes of Southern conservatives.

"Nixon cemented the ascendance of a conservative over a moderate ideology within the Republican Party," she wrote in "Living History." "I sometimes think that I didn't leave the Republican Party as much as it left me."

Later that month, back home in Park Ridge, Hillary saw news of the riots at the Democratic National Convention. Telling their parents they were going to a movie, she and Betsy Ebeling drove down to Grant Park and walked through clouds of tear gas, past battles between cops and antiwar demonstrators. At one point, they ran into a high school classmate who was providing first aid to the protestors.

The Vietnam War, Ebeling said, "was a huge dividing point for all of us. I think we were all really questioning it. All of that, McCarthy and all of that stuff, had come to a point where we decided we couldn't support an organization that was for the war."

When Hillary returned to Wellesley, she told Schechter she wanted to write her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky, the radical Chicago community organizer she had met during a previous summer break. That's when the professor knew she'd passed a watershed -- much as the rest of the country did that year.

"What that meant was that she was vitally interested in the problems of poor people," he said. "And Republicans are traditionally not interested in the problems of poor people. By that September, she had made up her mind."