Dave Neiwert, as usual, nails it:
We’ve known for a couple of years that the “Clinton Rules” of journalism would be in full effect this election cycle. What’s been amusing has been watching its very practitioners — the Beltway Village Idiots — defending those rules by claiming, as they always do, they’re perfectly appropriate because the Clintons, you know, really are Awful People.
But don’t be fooled. The “Clinton Rules” really don’t just apply to the Clintons. Barack Obama and his followers will be discovering this soon enough.
:
… (long, well documented post on how the Clinton Rules work) …
:
So far, Obama has been largely exempt from them (the exception being, of course, the long-running “Obama is a Muslim” tale). Some of that is most likely a product of the anti-Clinton animus: as long as he’s hurting Hillary, he’ll be cut a certain amount of slack.
I’m sure a lot of Democrats have been taking the depth and breadth of the Hillary Hate into account in their decisions on who to support, and a number of them are leaning toward Obama because of it. The thinking seems to be that because of the Clinton Rules, it might be better to nominate someone else. Certainly, Obama and his campaign have encouraged that view — and it must be noted that, so far, polling data does indicate he has a real advantage.
But as Stanley Fish quite adroitly observed:
- Electability (a concept invoked often) is a code word that masks the fact that the result of such reasoning is to cede the political power to the ranters. Carolyn Kay (456) makes the point when she observes that if you vote against Clinton because you fear the virulence of her most vocal enemies, “you have allowed the right-wing hatemongers to decide who our candidate will be.” Underlying this surrender of the franchise to those least qualified to exercise it is the complaint (rarely overtly stated) that the Clintons have had the bad taste to undergo the assassination of their characters in public and have thereby made us its unwilling spectators.
Moreover, the Clinton Rules are a systemic problem, not a personal one. People today forget that when he was elected in 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign was all about finding a “new vision” and a fresh, bipartisan approach to politics, “reaching across the aisle” and forging the same kind of alliances that Barack Obama likes to tout now. He entered office full of hope that he could work with conservatives and liberals alike to get things done — essentially the same kind of politics Obama is now touted by the George Wills of the Beltway for representing.
Well, we all saw how that worked out, didn’t we?
Don’t worry: If Obama is in fact the nominee, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Clinton Rules will be applied to him as well. We’ve already seen the germ of this with the “cult of Obama” nonsense, which has already morphed into the “Obama equals Hitler” meme.
I think Obama has some real strengths, and I’ll enthusiastically support him if he wins the nomination. But I think the phenomenon that Neiwert describes — that faint aura of concern about the integrity of HClinton’s character, or the hope that somehow Obama will escape the same, ongoing character assassination the Clintons have been subjected to for years — is exactly right. He won’t. It’ll be ugly. The only way through this is if we don’t drink the KoolAid, and base our choices on our own preferences and knowledge.
Read the whole thing.
February 17th, 2008 by 
Rory Harper
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