Sam Smith
A couple of decades
of reporting on the real Clintons has taught me that Democrats and liberals
are deeply indifferent to how they have been misled. Like victims of abuse,
they have been trained to accept the word of their abusers.
The Clintons, who are about the most effective political con artists I’ve ever run
across, have been major players in transforming their party into something far
removed from what made it successful from the New Deal to the Great Society. In
fact, on domestic issues, even Nixon was more liberal than Bill Clinton.
Clinton was a successful tool of a deliberate effort by
conservative Democrats to dismantle the party’s past, for which we are still
playing the price, symbolized by the repeal of Glass Stiegel and the assault on social welfare. Hillary Clinton
follows in his footsteps, creating a impressive illusion that she represents
something far from her reality.
Her skill is not in governing, not in policy, not in
principle, but rather in fooling people. Her early and soon classic technique
was that you don’t need to challenge any facts in criticism, you just have to label the critics as “haters.”
Sort of like being anti-Semitic if you don’t agree with Benjamin Netanyahu
You can read some of the facts here. But it is clear that facts probably won’t
become important until it’s too late to do anything about them, which is to say
when Hillary Clinton is nominated.
At that point the game will dramatically change. Hill Clin’s
past, which the corporate media has been obediently hiding, will likely
suddenly become so prominent that it may become the major focus of the
campaign.
This is not to say there will be anything noble driving the
criticism. The current crop of Republican candidates is the biggest bunch of ignorant
losers and liars we will ever have seen at a political convention. But that
doesn’t mean they can’t win, especially against a candidate whose previously hidden
problems become the talk of the day.
According to our moving average of polls, there are four GOP
candidates who are only 8-10 points behind Hill Clin. This mean there need only
be a 5-6 point shift in the electorate to turn the count around.
Is this possible or likely? Well, hidden from public view by
a media and Democrats wanting to bash Nader in 2000 was the fact that during
the campaign, Nader’s poll count hardly changed at all, while Gore’s did
dramatically. Between September and October about 7% of the electorate changed
its minds and became pro-Bush.
And where did these votes come from? Well, Michael Eisencher
reported in Z Magazine that 20% of all Democratic voters, 12% of all self-
identified liberal voters, 39% of all women voters, 44% of all seniors,
one-third of all voters earning under $20,000 per year and 42% of those earning
$20-30,000 annually, and 31% of all voting union members cast their ballots for
Bush. You kill a brand and you pay the price.
Another factor in the outcome was the impact of the Clinton
scandals. 68% of voters thought Clinton would go down in history more for his
scandals than for his leadership. 44% said that the scandals were somewhat to
very important and 57% thought the country to be on the wrong moral track. In
short, the individual who did the most harm to Gore was Bill Clinton. In one
poll, 80% of the voters who considered honesty mattered most, voted for Bush,
the largest dichotomy of personality found.
If Gore had simply distanced himself from the Clinton moral
miasma he would probably have won.
An explosion of Hill Clin scandals could have a similar
effect. Of course, one can’t predict how
this will play out, but, all ideology aside, as a simple practical matter the
Democrats are playing with possible electoral disaster by deluding themselves
that the Clinton scandals won’t come back to the fore and won’t make a
difference.
As one small indicator consider this. A recent poll found
Hill Clin only four points ahead of Christie and 5 points ahead of Paul among
independents.
If this doesn’t concern at least some Democrats, their
remarkable abuse by the Clintons has been even more mind-warping than one might
have imagined. They don’t need political consultants, they need psychotherapists.
