NYT
Earlier this year at a campaign rally, Bill Clinton said that when he was at Yale, he told Hillary: “I have met all the most gifted people in our generation and you’re the best.”
Now, it’s always nice to hear a husband say he thinks his wife is tops. But I can’t get past the idea that while Bill Clinton was still in law school he believed he already knew every baby boomer worth knowing.
“I didn’t even know everybody in my dorm,” said a friend when I told him this story.
Obviously, Clinton wasn’t including Barack Obama, who was only about 12 at the time. Now, Obama’s campaign is the revenge of Gen XYZ — an inconvenient reminder to the 50- and 60-somethings that they’ve become part of the system they used to decry. His big rally this week in Greenwich Village was an event that Hillary could never have pulled off — politics as a dating scene. Thousands and thousands and thousands of mostly young people swarmed into Washington Square Park where they were warmed up by a 25-year-old Asian-American rapper named Jin, who announced that Obama was going to be getting “my first vote ever.”
To this crowd, Clinton is what you hope you won’t have to settle for at the end. Better than Bush, of course, but not a real agent for change. “There are competent people who will manage the system the way it is,” said Obama about you-know-who, and, of course, the crowd cheered that no, they wanted someone braver and better and maybe even ... younger.
The Democratic Party seems to be gradually acclimating itself to the idea that Hillary Clinton is going to be the nominee. It’s a little like that frog in a beaker of water that Al Gore talks about in his global warming speech — the one who won’t notice he’s being boiled to death if you turn up the heat ever so gradually. Day by day, debate by debate, poll by poll, the sense of Hillary’s inevitability seems to be seeping in.
She thinks she’s got it nailed as long as she doesn’t make any mistakes, and that can be a trap. It is possible to be so careful that you drive everybody crazy, make them so itchy for adventure, for a noble mission instead of a winnable hand of poker, that they’ll be willing to undo all your hard work just to juice things up.
During the latest Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton was exactly that kind of candidate. When she was asked if she favored lifting the cap on Social Security taxes (currently only the first $97,500 in income is taxed), all she would say was that she wanted to “put fiscal responsibility first.”
As opposed to all the other people who want to put it last.
When the moderator, Tim Russert, asked whether she was completely ruling out the idea of lifting the cap, this is what Clinton had to say:
“Well, I take everything off the table until we move toward fiscal responsibility and before we have a bipartisan process. I don’t think I should be negotiating about what I would do as president. You know, I want to see what other people come to the table with.”
This is an excellent example of how to string together the maximum number of weasel words in one sentence. It was also pretty typical of Hillary’s entire evening. It’s one thing to refuse to answer a hypothetical question about whether there is any circumstance under which you might ever use nuclear weapons against Iran. It’s another to refuse to commit on who you’d root for if the Yankees played the Cubs in the World Series. No young person is going to fall in love with politics because of a candidate who says: “I would probably have to alternate sides.”
The Republican debates have become an ongoing suspense drama in which viewers try to guess which of these unlikely suspects will actually become a presidential nominee. The Democratic ones, meanwhile, are becoming less about the competition and more and more focused on how Hillary performs. That’s bad for the Clinton camp, since her strategy is all about not losing. She never gets caught in a disaster, but if you’re waiting for her to say something unexpected or pointed or forthcoming, you may have a long night.
In that last debate, the candidates were asked if they thought it was appropriate for a teacher to read young children a story about a handsome prince who marries a — handsome prince. Clinton started off by taking an all-purpose stand against divisiveness and ended with a plug for hate crimes legislation. In between, she said this: “With respect to your individual children, that is such a matter of parental discretion. I think that, obviously, it is better to try to work with your children, to help your children understand the many differences that are in the world and to really respect other people and the choices that other people make, and that goes far beyond sexual orientation.”
Now people, don’t you think the most gifted person of her generation could do better than this?
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