Sunday, November 25, 2007

"I think it's going to come down to: Do you really want Bill Clinton back in the White House?"   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Donna Brazile and I seem to look at the 2008 elections similarly. What I wrote earlier in the month:

[Romney] ought to encourage Americans to read the new Sally Bedell Smith book, For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years, wherein you’ll find passages like: “Finally, on Friday, February 28, Bill invited Lewinsky to an evening taping of his weekly radio address. Afterward he instructed Betty Currie to escort Lewinsky into his private study . . . For the first time in eleven months, they were sexually intimate, first in the hallway and then in the bathroom. When he pushed her away during oral . . . “

Why read this stuff? Voyeurism? Nope. There’s a substantive reason. As I started to read the book, I, political junkie, got bored; then frustrated. I’ve been there, done that. I’ve (unfortunately) read the Starr Report. I’ve lived through the blue dress and all the other details. We all lived through that. And while the impeachment was about important public issues — perjury and abuse of power — it all stemmed from, and fed into, that drama that is the Clintons.

For all the Clintons’ talk about getting-back-to-the-people’s-business, it was, in the end, about the Clintons. All the time “wasted” on impeachment was the result of the refusal of a president to resign, after being caught red-handed in perjury and obstruction of justice. Hillary Clinton, who stakes her claim of executive experience on her two-for-the-price-of-one days in the White House, hasn’t apologized; to the contrary, she continues to rant about a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Romney is onto something, turning his attention to Hillary before he’s had a chance to win a primary or caucus. He has a point about experience: Unlike Romney, and unlike Rudy Giuliani, she hasn’t run anything successfully. I predict that this fact — that her chief experience is not in actually running anything, but simply in being a Clinton — will be what finally defeats her candidacy.

11/25 12:01 PMShare