Hillary Clinton Is Turning Into Richard Nixon and Bill Belichick
Raymond Chandler once wrote a great passage about drug addicts, but he might as well have been describing politicians, another group of people who rarely know when to quit without intervention.
The novelist said addicts at first turn to pills and shots just to get over the humps. Only after a while, he wrote, “It gets to be all humps.”
It’s gotten to be all humps for Hillary Clinton. She never really has an audience anymore. Instead, she’s almost always surrounded. That’s a bad place for a politician to be at the start of a grueling two-year popularity contest.
Back in 2008, I wrote a piece comparing Hillary to Richard Nixon, another politician driven by a feeling of being cornered. Back then, the similarities were political.
As Nixon had against Kennedy, Hillary in ’08 was running against a sunny, charismatic candidate who often got a pass from an adoring media. While it took Nixon eight years to find a way forward from that dilemma, Hillary against Barack Obama pivoted mid-race and recalibrated her politics to fit a disaffected, angry voting bloc, one that sympathized with her frustration:
Hillary has basically run exactly Nixon’s 1968 campaign. Her stump speech from the get-go was all about the “invisible Americans,” a nearly word-for-word echo of Nixon’s revolutionary “forgotten Americans” strategy of that year. She was targeting a slice of the electorate that had chosen to stay on the sidelines during a cultural war and secretly yearned for someone in the political center to restore order. It’s no accident that Hillary was on the opposite side of every issue that sent lefties to the streets in the Bush years, from the war to free trade to the Patriot Act.
Odd as it seemed coming from such a career Beltway insider, playing an angry insurgent champion of the little guy somehow fit Hillary like a glove. Coupled with It-Girl candidate Obama’s maladroit mumblings about Middle America bitterly “clinging to guns and religion,” Hillary’s “Invisible Americans” meme was a political gold mine.
But sometime during the course of the primary season, it got a little too personal. Hillary in her speeches began to return over and over again to whatever public attacks she happened to be facing at the time.
I remember one reporter comparing her to a “late-stage Lenny Bruce,” as she increasingly spent stump time pleading her case against her tormentors:
To listen to a Hillary stump speech is to hear a tale of endless confrontations with enemies. At one event I attended in Iowa, she railed against the Republicans who tried to crush her over health care, the Chinese who tried to stifle her over her “women’s rights are human rights” speech, a pharmaceutical industry that bucked when she passed a law requiring that drugs be tested for use on children, and a press that tells lies about her.
Clinton aides seemed pushed to something beyond rage by the Obama campaign, which they saw as a cynical attempt by old enemies in the Democratic establishment to jump Hillary’s place in line and put an unprepared lightweight on the throne.