FLOTSAM & JETSAM: When the Hill spills

Monday, August 04, 2014

When the Hill spills

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.