A Democratic presidential debate on Martin Luther King Day lent
itself to an atmosphere of concord. But it quickly dissipated as
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama traded ugly charges.
Obama, clearly furious with the two-headed Billary beast he
faces, reminded the audience, after Hillary tried to throw in his
face his pro-Reagan comment from last week, that in the 1980s she
was a greedy corporate lawyer.
“While I was fighting Reagan’s policies” on the streets of
Chicago as a community organizer, he said, Hillary was riding the
gravy train as an attorney sitting on the board of Wal-Mart.
Other upper cuts to the Billary beast ensued. “I can’t tell who
I am running against,” he said at one point, interrupting one of
Hillary’s moments of lawyerly parsing about what she said (rather
than her husband).
I have no idea if Obama’s ratcheted-up stridency here is good
politics. I suspect some commentators will say he looked at times
hyper and unnerved. But it is fun to watch, and there is much more
to mine here.
Why doesn’t he remind people that during Hillary’s
much-ballyhooed “35 years” of “other-oriented” service to the
unfortunates of the earth she was making gobs of money off
get-rich-quick schemes like her cattle futures trading? Gordon
Gekko would have beamed with pride as Hillary entered the alleged
age of Reagan greed with $100,000 in her pocket off a $1,000
investment in the cattle futures market.
Stung by Obama’s reference to her corporate hackery for
Wal-Mart, Hillary hit back. As a lawyer Obama had defended a
“slumlord,” she breathlessly huffed, then grabbed for some water.
Obama responded that his work for the guy was negligible (he billed
five hours on the man’s case, he said), but he might have also
mentioned that Hillary’s client list — and billing records as a
corporate attorney — don’t exactly bear much scrutiny either.
He could even mention that during one of her summers between
years at Yale Law School she knowingly worked for a Communist
lawyer, Bob Treuhaft, who many years later expressed astonishment
that such an ambitious, seemingly establishment girl would
associate with his over-the-top, radical law firm in Oakland.
HILLARY, LOOKING hot under the Armani collar, generated a few boos
with some other rough broadsides against Obama, and went into
screeching Vladimir Lenin mode after Obama noted her universal
healthcare disaster.
Hillary, of course, had other glistening moments of “experience”
than that one to tout and made sure to mention, in a pandering
gesture before the predominately black audience in South Carolina,
her work with Marian Wright Edelman at the Children’s Defense Fund,
back in those heady days (though she didn’t mention this) when she
was comparing the family to other institutions of oppression and
extolling socialist child care in France.
The anti-Reagan cord, which Hillary is striking hard so as to
poach the Daily Kos crowd from Obama, invites an obvious rebuttal:
If Reagan’s ideas were so appalling and unworkable, why did the
Clintons hire Dick Morris to steal them from their Republican
opponents?
Why did Clinton pal around endlessly in the 1980s with
self-described moderate Democrats like Al From whose entire message
was that the Dems had been whipped by Reagan on the front of ideas?
What, if not Reagan’s ideas, were the Clintons responding to when
they babbled on about the need to “redefine” the Democratic party
and come up with “innovative new” policies through the Democratic
Leadership Council?
It was because of Reagan’s ideological success that the Clintons
had to scramble and come up with head-faking triangulation polices
regarding welfare reform, school uniforms, v-chips, and so on.
Hillary is willfully distorting Obama’s comment about Reagan,
which was nothing more than a modest and obvious observation that
Reagan radically changed politics through his charisma and vision.
In this debate, as in the others, Obama seems to be already running
a general election campaign, seeking to draw disaffected
Republicans and independents into his ethos of quasi-bipartisan
uplift, while Hillary, with her tired anti-Reagan gibes, seems to
be running for Jimmy Carter’s second term.
The second part of the debate, in which the candidates sat in
chairs, wasn’t as lively as the first, but a few interesting
questions came up, including one about whether Bill Clinton was the
“first” black president. Obama graciously noted Bill Clinton’s
outreach to the black community. He said that he couldn’t answer
the question authoritatively, however, owing to his lack of
knowledge of Clinton’s “dancing skills.”
