Have the Clintons blown it, or do they know what they are doing?

William Kristol, the latest anti-conservative “conservative” to be installed on the New York Times op-ed page, writes::

[J]ust as Hillary was supposed to be finding her own voice, Bill decided to barge in, and to do so with a vengeance. This has been no favor to Hillary.

Right now, Hillary Clinton is ahead in the polls in almost all the big states voting. She is a tough and capable campaigner, and she may be able to hold on to those leads. But it is now clear that putting her in the White House brings a hyperactive Bill back in with her. Who needs it?

It seems to be the universal opinion that the former President Clinton’s intrusion into his wife’s campaign in South Carolina, in which he indulged in clearly racial put-downs of Barack Obama, was a major factor in Obama’s 55 to 27 (!!!) drubbing of Hillary in that state. Yet, according to the Telegraph, the Clintons have consciously decided to have Bill Clinton actively campaign as he has done, and to function as her de facto running mate if she if nominated. Can this be true? Can the Clintons be thinking that Bill’s popularity is such that the more actively he campaigns, and thus the more he demonstrates that he will function as co-president if she is elected, the more support she will receive?

But maybe that’s not so absurd at all. Didn’t I just agree the other day with a commenter who said that the liberals would rapidly forget their disapproval of the Clintons’s current behavior and end up supporting them, as they have done time and again in the past?

In any case, it seems to me that a new Clinton configuration or paradigm has emerged: While Hillary Clinton’s change to a more normal and less fake personality seems to have lasted, at least in my experience, as my (to me) amazing lack of a negative response to her personality, which started the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, has continued (please don’t hate me for saying that, I’m just reporting the facts), the essence of the Clintons has not changed at all. There are two true things here: (1) Hillary is genuinely a more pleasant personality now, and (2) she and her husband remain as ruthless, manipulative, and without conscience as ever. So from this point on, it’s not going to be enough for opponents of Hillary Clinton to react, as they sometimes done have in the past, solely against her fake, shrill, angry-radical persona; they’re going to have to see what she is really is and what she is up to, despite the fact that she is not so easily hate-able as she used to be.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 28, 2008 08:31 PM | Send