I’VE BEEN WATCHING HILLARY Clinton’s campaign flailing in its death throes for about a month now, and with her lead in Iowa gone, it’s past being funny and is almost to the point of being cruel. Bill Clinton is letting his wife believe that she really can be president. I understand where he’s coming from; I was taught that the secret to a happy relationship is picking the hill you want to die on. If I had his appetites and I was married to that woman, I’d tell her whatever she wanted to hear, too.
But this isn’t right. He’s the only one in her world who can do it, so he should just tell her the truth: The country is ready for a woman to be president, it’s just not ready for her to be that woman. She’s not going to like hearing it, but someone has to prepare her for the post-Valentine’s Day reality of having lost the nomination. Since he’s the one who allowed her to delude herself into believing she can win (forcing us all to contemplate the horror of another Clinton presidency), it’s only natural that he be the one to bring her back to reality when it’s over.
It should make her feel better to know that she’s going to be needed in the Senate. By next January, Democrats will control both houses of Congress, as well as the White House. The Republican Party, having lost seats in consecutive elections, will be on the road to irrelevance, if not extinction. I seriously doubt anyone would object to Hillary becoming Senate Majority Leader, making her and Nancy Pelosi the two most powerful women in the world for the foreseeable future. It’s not the presidency, but think of the example it would set for Chelsea. Her parents will have gone from Bubba and Hillary Clinton of Little Rock, Ark., to President and Senator Clinton of Chappaqua, NY, in one generation. That’s not just progress, it’s unprecedented social climbing.
She’ll also be relieved to know that had she won the nomination, their marriage would have become fair game in the general election campaign. With her losing, the family skeletons can stay deep in the closet where they belong, which is good because the vast right-wing conspiracy that turned the name “Clinton” into a dirty word would have revved back up and made the six years Bill spent under investigation seem like the good old days. All the work she’s done to repair the family name over the last seven years would be systematically undone by non-stop “Where are they now?” stories about Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky on talk radio and Fox News.
She’ll be able to take comfort in the fact that her husband ran in a time of peace and unprecedented prosperity, but she had to run in the middle of a disastrous military operation with a weak dollar and a housing crisis to boot. Bill ran against Bob Dole, a man with a permanent grimace who people used to deliberately turn their gaze away from. Hillary has to run against the handsome, smiling face of the political movement of a generation, broadcast live and free of charge to every media markets in the U.S. by Ms. Oprah Winfrey. It’s almost not fair.
Bill Clinton has about a month to figure out what he’s going to say. If I was him, I’d blame her campaign advisors, who have been wrong at every turn. They tried to sell her as the inevitable nominee, apparently not realizing that her closest opponent only has to stay within shouting distance to claim victory in Iowa and New Hampshire (and anything other than a landslide win for an “inevitable” candidate is a loss). They won’t let her admit that it was a mistake to authorize the president to invade Iraq (this one blows my mind). They still don’t realize they’re running a pro-war candidate in an anti-war party’s primary. Worst of all, they’ve pinned their hopes on portraying her as having experience being president because she lived in the White House for eight years. Apparently, they didn’t predict the painfully simple follow-up question any married man would ask (“does that mean my wife has experience doing my job?”), so they made the fatal mistake of never preparing an answer.
Rule number one in sales is don’t pitch the dog. It means, save your sales pitch for someone who can make a decision. When you look at photos of the Clinton Cabinet, you won’t see Hillary in any of them. When you ask what, exactly, was her experience, you won’t get a straight answer. That’s why she won’t win. In her husband’s administration, she may not have been the dog, but she certainly wasn’t a decision-maker.
KENNY MACK is a writer, comedian and occasional pundit living in Santa Monica. He
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 28, 2007. Read the original PDF.