Clintoniavelli: Why Hillary Is Campaigning For John McCain

Why haven't the Clintons, smart and ruthless politicos that they are, dropped out of Hillary's candidacy? They know they can't win the Democratic nomination and are damaging their party, and they do think of it as fully theirs, more every day. So let's try surveying the terrain from their perspective, even thinking like them: 'Ok, so things didn't work out as planned, but we've still got checkmate if we knee-cap Obama. McCain becomes President, he's stuck with an economic "Repression," a decayed Mid-East occupation, and he's got cancer. The country will be more beat up, more ready for Hillary in 2012. Now, we will have to take out Pretty Boy a little more obviously than we took out Gore, Dean, and Kerry. Then Big Dog just gotta wait a little while.'

To them, the Democratic Party is their castle, and they will pour boiling oil over constituents before they lose it. Playing to the gutter of American history and human sentiment may not yet achieve the Clintons' goals; a smeared Obama is a tested Obama, and people understand that the more endangered the system, the more important its quality of leadership. While a polling lead has decreased, he will be running against the atrabilious John McCain, the Barnum & Bailey of lobbyists awaiting his own turns in the mea culpa spotlight. But the kitchen sink phase of Hillary's run might also work. If it does, Hillary's Berserker Campaign for 2012, an article by author Jeffrey St. Clair, will have been prescient indeed. If it fails he's only one insight shy, and truly has a handle on the Clintons:

...data culled from pulse polls and focus groups probing the hidden prejudices in the psyche of white America are being packed like shrapnel into political landmines set for Obama: he's unpatriotic, he's un-Christian, he's a Palestinian symp and, yes, he's black. That's three strikes and one head shot. Exploitation of racial panic is second nature to the power couple Ishmael Reed calls Ma and Pa Clinton.

Bill Clinton launched his 1992 campaign by personally overseeing the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged young black man. He wagged his finger at the rapper Sister Souljah, denouncing her music and political opinions as a danger to young minds. The Clintons pilloried their one-time friend Lani Guinier for her legal writings on the status of blacks and women and booted Dr. Jocelyn Elders from her position as Surgeon General for her refreshingly candid statements about the utility of condoms and masturbation for sexually active youths.

And that's how they treated people they knew. At a structural level, the Clintons' economic and social agenda, incubated at the conservative Democratic Leadership Council, struck directly at poorest precincts of America, targeting blacks and Hispanics with a fervor not seen since Pat Buchanan and Kevin Phillips crafted the infamous Southern Strategy for Richard Nixon. Hence, the dismantling of welfare, harsh federal crime bills, the refusal to intervene against racial profiling or redress the grievous injustices caused by the racially-motivated sentences handed out for crack cocaine.

The fallout from Ms. Clinton's racially-tinged blitz against Obama will spread far and wide across her party like the toxic particles from a nuclear blast. They've done it all before. The Clintons' reckless first two years in the White House, from the heavy-handed Travel Office fiasco to the fires of Waco and HRC's sophomoric bungling of the health care reform, spurred the GOP takeover of congress in 1994, which they used to their political profit.

Then in 1996, Clinton refused to allocate DNC money to tight senate and congressional races, a miserly tactic that allowed the faltering Republicans to retain control of both houses of Congress. It was a cynical decision that many high-ranking Democrats believe constituted a deliberate sabotage of the party's prospects, designed to secure a monopoly-like control of the party apparatus for the Clintons, turning the DNC into their own private PAC.

Read the full article here, surfaced by Bruce at The River Blog.