Tuesday, June 03, 2008

It's the end of the world as they know it


Have you ever wondered whether the Clintons are metaphors for America itself? That Bill and Hill are the story of modern (and postmodern) America time-compressed and writ small?

After all, it takes a little story to illustrate a big story, right?

BILL CLINTON was born into a family of modest means . . . and into a world of familial dysfunction, which obviously left its scars on his psyche. Yet, through sheer smarts and epic drive and ambition, he got himself into Georgetown, then into Yale Law, then embarked on a life of the law and public service -- and marriage, family and his own one-man sexual revolution -- until he climbed and clawed and "Comeback Kidded" his way to the top of the world.

From 1993 to 2001, no man on earth was as powerful as William Jefferson Clinton.

And at his side was Hillary. Born Hillary Rodham, the future first lady, U.S. senator and presidential candidate lived a bourgeois life of relative middle-class privilege. And after getting the political bug as a "Goldwater Girl" in 1964, she used her drive and considerable smarts to shine at Wellesley College . . . and then Yale Law, where one of the most formidable political mergers of the modern age took shape.

She helped the family political franchise along through those years of struggle, until reaching the pinnacle of political power with her senior partner, Bill.

SOON, HOWEVER, the ultimate power couple would find that once you get to the top, the only place to go is down.

Clinton, Inc., weathered its own private Vietnam with l'affaire Lewinsky, which left the union -- and the partnership -- bruised and beaten, but intact and ready to begin plotting Hillary's ascent after an eight-year interregnum.

They thought it was "Morning in America." Instead, their trouble was just beginning.

Tim Reid of The Times in London gets it pretty much right-o in this account from the campaign trail:
Seventeen months after she sat regally in her New York living room and calmly declared: “I’m in and I’m in to win,” Hillary Clinton stands on a stage in a stifling hot shed in South Dakota, coughing and spluttering, as her daughter, Chelsea, grabs the microphone from her hand to take over the show.

“A long campaign,” the former First Lady chokes out between sips of water. Her husband, red-faced and exhausted – and having just apologised for another angry outburst in front of reporters – looks on wistfully at the final rally of his wife’s presidential bid, an endeavour that has been transformed from an inevitable juggernaut into a costly train wreck.

It was an extraordinary moment, exactly five months after the first contest in Iowa, to see the former First Family in the dying moments of the longest primary campaign in history, a gruelling journey across America that was meant to end in a Clinton restoration and has instead bought a very different inevitability: defeat at the hands of Barack Obama.


(snip)

In this final day of campaigning, Mrs Clinton was still defiant, still giving, as she has done for months, an impressive and detailed stump speech full of uplifting prescriptions for healthcare, taxes and energy independence. Yet there was a sense of a woman with her fingers in a leaking dam, straining to halt the impending flood of super-delegates to her rival. Even as she spoke in Sioux Falls, several of her Democratic Senate colleagues were meeting behind closed doors in Washington to plot the end-game by planning a mass endorsement for Mr Obama.

At two events she became convulsed by coughing fits. At one she got the name of the local mayor wrong. In Yankton, she completely lost her voice and had to leave the stage. Chelsea again took over, the reluctant, largely mute campaigner of Iowa now a star in her own right. During the day Mrs Clinton’s event advance team was laid off. Campaign staff were urged to turn in expense receipts. Young aides were talking about vacations. Several volunteers, amid a slightly hysterical fin de siècle atmosphere, gave Oscar-like speeches listing all the states they had visited.
PERHAPS NO COUPLE has been such poster children for their generation -- and for a whole era of American history -- as the Clintons . . . Bill and Hill. Their motto just as well could have been "You can't touch this," because, well, who could?

All good things, however, come to an end eventually. Bill and Hill perhaps knew that in their heart of hearts. But they never saw it coming, not until they were wandering -- shell-shocked and desperate -- through the ruins of the Clinton '08 campaign.

Now the former president and the would-be president appear for all the world like a couple of half-crazed refugees stumbling, glassy-eyed and babbling, out of the ruins of a political Dresden of their own making. Their reputations in tatters, their futures uncertain, they can't help but mindlessly prattle about glorious days still to come.

The world, alas, has moved on.

THE CLINTONS, Bill and Hill, are America. America, behold yourself . . . soon enough.

Soon enough.

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