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I'm in Las vegas, at yet another stiflingly full-of-shit Democratic debate, just breaking up now. The show tonight was a new low, with a suddenly cuddlesome troika of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards spending two hours giving each other friendly establishment back rubs while NBC played the Big Brother role, going to court to keep that meddling Dennis Kucinich off the stage. Afterward, the first flack to waddle into the spin cave is Mark Penn, Clinton's chief mouthpiece, one of Washington's most depraved and expensive lobbyist-whores.
Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he's fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm's length missing from the picture.
After Obama's win in Iowa, everyone familiar with the Clintons and how they operate could have set their watches by the Hillary camp's inevitable decision to start reminding America of the dangers of electing a black teenager on coke. There is now a sudden sense on the campaign trail that the electoral chaos of the last year is a thing of the past, that this race is once again back in the hands of scaly Washington pros like Penn, the whole contest reduced to a series of empty PR ploys on the level of a staged crying fit and a series of back-channel character attacks. The Clintons are back, running things as they always have, with their back-stabbing, inside-baseball mastery, their fanatical, almost religious pursuit of the political fork in the road, their boundless faith in ruthless corporate bagmen of the Penn genus and other such faceless electoral point-shavers.
This all becomes punishingly obvious when Penn, smiling broadly, leans into the hive of spin-room microphones and announces with a straight face that Barack Obama's refusal to describe himself as a "chief operating officer" of the government bureaucracy marks a "critical distinction" in the race.
"But if that's the big distinction," I say, "doesn't that underscore how alike they are on the big issues -- like free trade, health care and their exit strategy in Iraq?"
Penn reiterates that Obama is nothing but a visionary, before adding a Nevada-specific line about the state's federal radioactive waste dump. "And I think we saw some distinctions too on Yucca Mountain, which is an important issue in this debate!" he says.
"So some amorphous thing on leadership and Yucca Mountain are the distinctions between the main Democratic candidates for the presidency?"
Penn pauses, then smiles. "Those are the distinctions discussed in this debate," he hisses.
So this is what it has come to. Conventional wisdom holds that when Hillary shed tears in New Hampshire, seeming to crack under the pressure of being pounded daily in the press as an unlikable loser, she struck a powerful chord with female voters who saw her as a victim of a male-dominated culture determined to punish a strong woman for daring to seek power. And who knows, maybe there's something to that -- but by the time Hillary reached Nevada, I was strongly tempted not to give a shit. To see Hillary Clinton as a martyr for anything is to give her far too much credit for weakness and not nearly enough credit for her strengths, one of which happens to involve resurrecting, against all odds, the ghost of Richard Nixon.
What people forget about Clinton is that she is basically a Republican at heart. She campaigned for Barry Goldwater once upon a time and even canvassed poor neighborhoods in Chicago looking for "vote fraud" by Democrats. She was president of the College Republicans at Wellesley. In 1968, at the height of America's most intense cultural debate in a century, she only abandoned the Republican Party because it backed Dick Nixon instead of her favorite, Nelson Rockefeller.
See more stories tagged with: hillary clinton, richard nixon
Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.
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