THE TRAGEDY OF HILLARY...:

The Great Right Hope: Hillary Clinton? (Noemie Emery. 11/19/2008, Weekly Standard)

As he rose, all her old mainstays began to desert her. The trendies and glitzies peeled off, as did the students. The civil rights lobbies peeled off, as was expected. The feminists split. NARAL deserted, aborting her hopes at a critical moment. Hollywood and the fashion world broke for her rival, who looked like a film star, or a model for the Gap. The media swooned, and began to assail her, deriding her style, and clothes. As her previous base was collapsed by Obama, she responded by taking the only route open: She morphed by default into the champion of middle-aged, middle-class, small-town and middle America; of the more conservative, post-Reagan Democrats; and, by her party's standards, the hawks. In no time at all, Hillary Rodham of Wellesley and Yale became the new voice of the Democrats' social conservatives, defending rural voters and small town inhabitants against charges of "bitterness," saying elites had degraded the culture, knocking back shots of Crown Royal in bars. If Obama was Gary Hart, she was Henry (Scoop) Jackson; if he was the Priest, then she was the Warrior; if he was the Academician, pacific, detached and non-confrontational, she was the Jacksonian, ready to fight for her country and rights.

In this incarnation, she began to attack Obama for his lack of war-on-terror credentials, noting that she and John McCain had years of experience dealing with war-and-peace issues, while Obama had speeches. She ran ads implying Obama was not the right person to answer the phone when it rang in the White House at three in the morning with news of a terrorist outrage. She didn't just change, she seemed authentic in changing, as if a woman who had gone through multiple makeovers during decades in politics had finally found a persona that fit her. Martha's Vineyard flaked off, revealing the soul of a Midwestern scrapper. Conservatives watched, with surprise, with some awe, and with some bemusement. Perhaps this was her all along.

In the spring, conservatives found themselves pulling for Clinton, in the interests of keeping the Democratic feud going. But as time passed and she refused to dissolve in the face of adversity, a strategic alliance based on convenience became infused with a Strange New Respect. How tough she was. How relentlessly viable. How she resisted the pressure of Obama obsessives, who were trying to show her the door. And how right she was, at least from their viewpoint, and at least upon foreign affairs. "Hillary became the sane one in the race, at least from Republicans' perspectives," as Jennifer Rubin observed as the race ended, noting that she was the one who had ridiculed Obama's plans to meet unconditionally with the leaders of terrorist governments, who had defied her party to vote to classify the Iranian National Guard as a terrorist outfit, who had "looked at George Stephanopoulos with a look of incredulity" when he asked why, if Iran attacked Israel, she would bomb Iran into rubble, or at least smithereens.

Hillary had begun the campaign as the former First Feminist and the Empress-In-Waiting, ready to glide back into the White House on the strength of her husband's connections and donor base. She ended it as the Warrior Queen, more Margaret Thatcher than Gloria Steinem, alone in the last ditch as her false friends deserted, (and her husband proved useless), in her own private Alamo, fighting on to the end. The Alamo tends to loom large in conservative fantasies, which tend to feature John Waynes rather than Jane Fondas. Hillary, in the minds of some righties, had crossed over a crucial divide.

This shift in the Hillary Clinton persona did not go unobserved on the left, which commenced to tear her apart in the same terms of endearment it would later unleash upon Sarah Palin, and had used before on George W. Bush and Joe Lieberman. Moveon.org, founded ten years ago by liberal Democrats to defend the Clintons against impeachment proceedings, now assailed her with the savage ferocity they had once reserved for Ken Starr. As a result, perhaps, Hillary later refused to attack Sarah Palin, and treated her, and McCain, with personal courtesy throughout the campaign.

As for the conservatives, many of those who began 2008 willing to do anything to defeat her tended to end it feeling sorry she lost.

...is that she didn't run as Bill's wife -- and the natural heir to the New Democrat/compassionate conservative mantle -- from the get-go.

Posted by Orrin Judd at November 21, 2008 1:34 PM