In this capitalism gone mad column, I look at the case of Hillary Clinton whom the ultra right demonized to both her advantage and theirs, and whom they continues to vilify in its subsidized books, press, and an army of Internet websites. But it also deals with the Candide like reportage in the New York Times and leading newspapers that Hillary Clinton appears to be moving to the right, to position herself for a 2008 run for president. Defending her vote for the Bush war in Iraq and making statements about abortion that, without committing herself to a position opposed to legal pregnancy terminations, seems to be aimed at making herself acceptable to Roman Catholic and other conservative Democratic Party voters and moderate Republicans.

Since I don’t believe in grand political conspiracies, U.S. politics sometimes makes me wonder if Jonathan Swift was a greater thinker than Karl Marx.

Marx always looked for the material basis and ostensibly rational class interest behind the craziest of ideas, like Hillary Clinton as a radical socialist and feminist. Marx also dealt with the power of myth in history in one of his most famous comments on history, that it does repeat itself, but not exactly: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

Then, Marx was writing about the political advernturer Louis Napoleon, who rode to power in France by manipulating the myths that surrounded his Uncle (the emperor), whom the French masses identified with both great military victories and some of the lasting achievements of the French revolution, particularly the redistribution of land from the aristocracy to the gentry and peasantry.

Napoleon the Great and Napoleon the little Marx called them. Besides gender, there isn’t such a great difference between Hillary and Bill.

Hillary Clinton isn’t her husband, but appears to be emulating Bill, who had no great achievements but looks good today to large numbers of Americans when compared to the disastrous Bush administration. Clinton began as a relatively liberal young governor of Arkansas, an anti-union upper South state (the propaganda term is 'right to work') in the late 1970s. He moved to the right in the Reagan era, became a national leader of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of Democratic party officials (a sort of modern day national version of Tammany Hall) who seek to sustain the hegemony of the party’s right wing over its progressive labor and minority core constituencies. When Clinton ran successfully for President in 1992, he mixed Democratic Leadership Council rhetoric with some important progressive promises. Out of one side of his mouth he promised to fight to implement a national health program that would provide coverage for all and out of the other side that he would not be a 'tax and spend' Democrat. Most of all, Clinton ran on his personality, his folksy roguish charm, and that fact that he was not Bush.

His political conservativism and unbridled opportunism helped the ultra right by disillusioning labor (his support of NAFTA) and progressives. Given his center-right approach, he began with a compromise health care program and, even with a Democratic Congress ended by getting nothing, further disillusioning progressive constituencies. The ultra right helped Clinton by making his personality a major political issue, engaging in a sort of lunatic sexual McCarthyism that alienated even many conservatives as they launched a crusade to impeach him for lying in public about his adultery, something that had never even remotely been considered an impeachable offense at any time in U.S, history.

The ultra-right also helped Hillary Clinton by portraying her crazily as a radical leftist pulling the strings behind her immoral husband, a contemporary Eleanor Roosevelt...

As I am an historian by profession, I know a great deal about Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and believe me, Bill and Hillary Clinton were no Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. But the attacks on Hillary gave her a reputation that she really didn’t deserve among both liberal Democrats and many feminists. It propelled her into a New York Senate seat in 2000 as she solidly defeated an ultra-right Republican opponent.

Since then, Hillary Clinton has followed a path similar to her husband’s in the 1980s, although this in no way has reduced the savage personal and absurd political attacks that the right and the far right have continued to launch against her. In reality, she has been one of the most conservative Northern Democratic Senators, offering both no alternative to and very limited serious criticism of the Bush administration. Like a great many Democrats, including John Kerry, she did vote for Bush’s war in Iraq, but unlike some of them, including Kerry, she has not tried to distance herself from that vote, which one can interpret either as political forthrightness or as a signal to the ruling class that she will as president be ready and willing to continue to use military force unilaterally abroad to defend U.S. imperialism, something that her husband was more reluctant to do than Bush. Although readers of Dr. Don Sloan excellent work on the subject know that pregnancy terminations are extremely complex issues concerning women’s rights and lives and can’t be reduced to slogans like choice and right to life.

Hillary Clinton’s negative abstract comments on the issue don’t do anything but suggest that she is saying that she is not an uncritical abortion rights Democrat the way her husband thirteen years ago said that he was not a 'tax and spend' Democrat. She knows that she will get the votes of pro reproductive rights voters over any Republican, who will parrot the Pat Robertson religious right position on the issue. She hopes that she will win over some religious conservative voters whose life on earth continues to deteriorate thanks to right-wing Republican policies.

But she is, in the process, strengthening the right on the issue rather than pushing some of their supporters to the center by educating them on why it is important to keep pregnancy terminations legal.

Also, Clinton is sure that she will get the votes of most antiwar constituencies regardless of what she says about her vote in favor of the Iraq war because any Republican she runs against will be hailing the march of 'democracy' in Iraq and accusing the Democrats of being 'soft' in the 'war against terrorism.' But, once more, her positions undercut peace constituencies that are important parts of the Democratic Party. When you in effect demobilize your activists by seeking to ingratiate yourself with their political enemies, you run the risk of being 'too clever by half,' as the British used to say, defeating your party and its supporters, even if you succeed in winning elections for yourself.

The bookies have made Hillary Clinton a favorite for the 2008 presidential nomination, although it is way too early for that. And, in a politics which increasingly burlesques advertising, we should remember that she has great name recognition.

In a sense, the ultra-right and Hillary Clinton need each other, but Communists, the broad left, and especially progressive Democrats don’t need either one of them. Challenging the Republicans with another de facto Democratic Leadership Council Democrat with no connections to labor and peace activists, and a patronage politics approach to minorities and women (buy off their leaders and avoid the issues that energize them) is make the same mistake over and over again.

As a postscript, I have this brief anecdote that a former colleague and friend told me about Hillary early in the Clinton administration, when he got a chance to speak to her on the issue of universal health care. He’s an Englishman and suggested that the US should develop something like the British National Health Service, a comprehensive system of socialized medicine that was instituted by the Labor Party after WWII and made a huge positive difference in the lives of the British people, despite conservative attempts to weaken the program. Hillary replied smugly that such a program (which in the U.S. is called a single payer system and endorsed by many progressive Democratic Senators and Congresspersons) 'would never work in America,' something that shows the absurdity of the right’s continuing portrayal of her as a radical liberal with socialist tendencies.



Norman Markowitz can be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.