Where Did She Go Wrong?

A lousy campaign predicated on her insurmountability. I won't say "inevitability" because that word has connotations that I don't believe apply. I don't believe that HRC felt entitled. Her dogged fight seems to suggest otherwise. I do believe that she thought she was insurmountable because of the fundraising and powerbroking implications of the Clintons' position in the Party. That's a strategic assessment, not a Marie Antoinette grasp of entitlement.

A tack to the Right. It wasn't just on foreign affairs and defense policy. It was also on choice and gay rights issues. Clinton did not have the courage even to exert leadership on critical constitutional issues. Granted, the Democrats' legacy position should have been pro-choice and pro-gay marriage, and would have been far more risky to stake out than the Republicans' legacy "contra" views. But that doesn't excuse Democrats from stepping up. She didn't. Ever.

A stubborn refusal to come clean on a bad Iraq war vote. It really ticked me off that she would not admit to having erred on that decision. It ticked me off worse that she and the rest of the Democrats erred--allowed themselves to be railroaded by the Fear Factor. There, I think, was core character and judgmental weakness on her part and on the part of all who went that way. There simply was not suffient evidence.

A willingness to play racism. Linking Obama to Al Sharpton was a significant error not because it was stupid and racist, but because it lifted the lid and showed the inside of the can, worms and all. This was an utter capitulation to the worst power lust. It was Bill's capitulation, but it reflected on her.

A tin ear. She's had this reputation for many years -- the cookies comment comes to mind. The business about RFK's assassination belongs in this category, in my judgment. I don't believe for a minute that she meant what the Right suggests. I think she was thinking out loud, and what came up, came out. Public officials have to have a better filter than that.

A media network hostile to HRC from Day One. Matthews was there then and he was there now, along with Fox and the rest. The Clintons have attracted a level of hostility not seen since FDR. I've never understood why, when the GOP has given us so many more worthy options. Suffice to say that from Candy Crowley's bitchy innuendo to Chris's outright misogyny and Wolf Blitzer's predictable negative spin, she's had an up-hill climb that no other candidate has faced in this contest. Some substantial part of this hostility is pure sexism.

Bad Bill's legacy (Good Bill's legacy never showed up. We didn't hear much about reigned in spending, a balanced budget, a short, won war, and a long reign of peace. We did hear about Monica, about the ghost of Bill in the Hillary White House, and so on.

Voter sexism. Sure. How much is hard to say, but judging from the boyz in the mainstream media--and some of the girlz too--sexism is alive and well. Missteps and flaws that would have been overlooked in men have been magnified and hammered into our consciousnesses because they are part of Hillary. Not to mention gratuitously sexist and ageist volleys lobbed at her, visually and in words.

But of all the factors that sunk HRC, the most significant, the sine qua non, was that she faced a brilliant, once-in-a-generation competitor. Obama has the magic. In addition, his campaign was right on every point, from its fundraising to its delegate to its tonal strategy. Except for his occasional missteps --campaigning in South Carolina with a professional gay hater -- and despite the spectre of Jeremiah Wright, he has almost always appealed to what we are capable of being at our best. His careful inclusion of us, over against her "me, I, me" rhetoric enlisted us at a deeper level in deciding our future. It will create a deeper buy-in, as well.

How Does it Feel to Have Your Rights. . .

when people you care about don’t have theirs?

It’s a simplistic question, granted, but it’s a starting point, a question we all ought to ask. Certainly we all ought to ask everyone in Congress, and especially Republicans, the party of metamorphic rock, Vishnu, precambrian schist compressed for millions of years to utter imperviousness.

Reportage on the Capitol Hill debate on ENDA noted a split in the gay/lesbian community over a pragmatic political decision (is there any other kind?) to bring ENDA forward stripped of a clause that would have added transgendered people to the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.

To their everlasting credit, 90 prominent gay and lesbian organizations successfully petitioned Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pull the legislation until the House can support a measure that includes transgendered people. Unprecedented.

To its everlasting shame, the Human Rights Coalition (HRC), the nation’s largest gay/lesbian rights advocacy group, decided to waffle on the principle of inclusion. Joe Solmonese, HRC president, announced that while HRC supports an inclusive ENDA, it will not encourage House members to oppose a stripped-down version.

Biases come in handy, don’t they? As long as we have our biases, we don’t have to face our feelings. Ditto "pragmatics." Ditto fear.

That goes for Congress, it goes for you, and it goes for me, too. As long as we can trot out a plausible reason why someone else doesn’t quite have what it takes to be fully human, or why society needs to be protected from universal equality, or why the majority can't be moved on principle, there are any number of things we can justify.

Illegals, for instance, don’t deserve to be treated with compassion because, unlike the rest of us, they’ve broken the law.

Transgender people? I dunno, what’s the problem? If a person’s sexual identity isn’t clear and firma the way it ought to be, a person isn’t a human being?

What is it with this country? How many goddamned times does it take for us to learn that no matter what excuse we manufacture, we’re always going to be wrong arbitrarily to deny any human group full membership in the Society of Actual Human Beings?

Even a bean sprout knows to vary its path when it bumps into an Immutable Thing.

And oh yes, there is an immutable Thing here. It is that unless a group’s behaviors compel restraint, we have a duty to treat that group with regard.

I’m not among those who equate a bivalve with a canine. I don’t say that human beings exist in precisely the same relationship with chickens as with horses. And I don’t say that all animals are entitled to precisely the same rights we claim for humans. That’s another conversation, and one I’ll gladly engage in another post.

But when it comes to human beings, certain rules apply universally. When the nature of your being does not, when you inherently, in who you are, do not harm others, you and those like you are entitled to claim their protection.

There are good reasons for laws against child porn and pedophiles. Good reasons for laws against slave-holders and slavery. Good reasons for laws against, oh, cannibalism and necrophilia—a word I didn’t even know existed until I was, like, 40! Good reasons for laws against polygamy when it involves higher orders of power, influence, or sway acting on lesser ones--when, for example, a grown man of property and persuasion can compel a young girl, without either, to act against her own inherent dignity, to undermine her own best interests, independence, and self respect.

Harm, then, derives from individual aberrations – sociopathy and pathology – or from collective decisions – to invade, occupy, torture, oppress, exploit, exterminate. Harm does not derive from skin color, or genital configuration, or shape of eye, or sexual orientation, or gender, or ethnicity, per se. Harm does not derive inevitably from denomination, or nationality, or dietary preference, or shoe size.

But laws that deny full membership in the Society of Actual Human Beings to people on the basis of an arbitrary (or topical) classification are, well, atavistic. Laws like that are throwbacks.

They come from the same place that makes my dog hate the vacuum cleaner, except that at least my dog can say it makes a really scary noise.

I mean, do those people have any idea how effing STOOPIT they are? If they want a family reunion, they can always go out back and look under a rock.