“There are those who would say of Hillary’s involvement in radical politics, “Aw, she was just a kid.” But she wasn’t just a kid. She was a middle-aged woman of 40 when sponsoring the hard left from her perch at the New World Foundation. Moreover, she has not, as far as I know, publicly repudiated or even distanced herself from the views or activism described in this article, and her husband’s presidential campaign was the perfect occasion to do so. There is no reason she ought to be forgiven, when she hasn’t repented. Especially since she is right now doing her utmost to drive her husband’s campaign into her own corner of the Democratic party, where the liberal left and the radical left meet.”http://spectator.org/64728_wests-rude-houseguests/
At the Democratic debate last Saturday night, Hillary Clinton was caught in a political blunder — she brought up her radical days as a ’60 student activist. As it happens, there was a lot more where that came from, as Daniel Wattenberg’s seminal piece from the 1992 campaign captured for all time. She was in short never one to go soft. Again, from the August 1992 American Spectator.
Hillary Clinton has been likened to Eva Peron, but it’s a bad analogy. Evita was worshipped by the “shirtless ones,” the working class, while Hillary’s charms elude most outside of an elite cohort of left-liberal, baby-boom feminists — the type who thought Anita Hill should be canonized and Thelma and Louise was the best movie since Easy Rider. Hillary reckons herself the next Eleanor Roosevelt. But, standing well to the left of her husband and enjoying an independent power base within his coalition, Hillary is best thought of as the Winnie Mandela of American politics. She has likened the American family to slavery, thinks kids should be able to sue their parents to resolve family arguments, and during her tenure as a foundation officer gave away millions (much of it in no-strings-attached grants) to the left — including sizable sums to hard-left organizers. She is going to cause her husband no end of political embarrassment between now and November — and who knows how long afterward.
By the morning of June 5, four top Clinton campaign aides — David Wilhelm, George Stephanopoulos, Eli Segal, and Stanley Greenberg — had had enough of Susan Thomases and Harold Ickes, two ultra-liberal campaign aides who had fastened themselves to Hillary. According to a Clinton insider, the four had concluded that “Susan Thomases is running this campaign with Harold Ickes through Hillary,” and gave Bill Clinton this ultimatum: “Either [Thomases] goes, or we’re all going and she can run the campaign.” Ever the Conciliator-in-Chief, Clinton managed to avert a mass resignation by the top echelon of his campaign staff. “They papered all this over for the time being, but it won’t last,” says the insider.
Thomases, a New York lawyer, is “the most doctrinaire liberal or old-line thinker around” the campaign, says a Clinton adviser. “Someone who just doesn’t get any of the reform/New Covenant message.” Ickes, son of Roosevelt’s New Deal Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, is anathema to many centrist Democrats who rallied early to the Clinton candidacy. In 1988 he was Jesse Jackson’s convention manager. In 1972, he was a key delegate selector for George McGovern, bending party rules to disestablish traditional Democratic constituencies — middle-class and socially conservative — in favor of student, feminist, and minority activists. A Clinton insider calls him “the most evil man on the face of earth,” adding: “He has done more single-handedly to destroy the Democratic party than anyone else.”
The immediate cause of the threatened walk-out was a national poll that the four, along with Frank Greer, had worked on with Thomases. When, despite opposition from Thomases, the others prepared to run the poll, Thomases complained to Hillary. The latter interceded with her husband, and the poll was killed. But the poll was small potatoes compared to the strategic coup that Hillary and her allies pulled off in blocking the move of Clinton’s campaign headquarters from Little Rock to Washington, a move many considered inevitable after Clinton’s victory in the New York primary. In Little Rock, lines of authority are fuzzy, and Hillary’s temple dogs roam free. By keeping the campaign in Little Rock, they simultaneously froze out ideological adversaries linked to the centrist, Washington-based Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a group of seasoned national campaign professionals. “Hillary’s probably the only person in this campaign who wanted it to be in Little Rock. The DLC crowd and the centrists — all of Washington — have basically been left high and dry,” says a campaign source.
An influx of senior political talent would have left Mrs. Clinton’s politically inept allies licking envelopes — Thomases is the political genius who guided Bill Bradley, a New Jersey institution since his All-America days at Princeton, to a 50-47 re-election squeaker over underfunded, unknown challenger Christine Todd Whitman in 1990. And moving the campaign to Washington would have meant more conventional wife-of duties for the gaffe-prone Hillary. “You bring it to Washington and the first thing you do is you get the Tom Donilons, the John Sassos, and all the grown-ups involved with real experience. They’re going to —number one — kick out the Thomaseses and the Ickeses,” explains an insider. “Number two, they’re going to put Hillary in a very different position in the campaign.”
Hillary Clinton’s unfavorable poll ratings have risen as high as 29 percent in recent months. “Negatives” of 40 percent are generally fatal for a candidate; for a new-to-the-national-scene wife of a candidate, negatives in the 30 range are disastrous. The image of Mrs. Clinton that has crystallized in the public consciousness is, of course, that of Lady Macbeth: consuming ambition, inflexibility of purpose, domination of a pliable husband, and an unsettling lack of tender human feeling, along with the affluent feminist’s contempt for traditional female roles.
