Clinton in South Carolina
Victor Davis Hanson
I was listening tonight to a C-Span broadcast of Bill Clinton’s stump speech for his wife in South Carolina. Here are my conclusions:
1. In her mid-twenties, right out of law school, Hillary’s philanthropy and social service were of such a magnitude that they almost immediately found their way into federal law. Indeed, much of our comprehensive legislation concerning children and the poor had their geneses through her twenty-something work. The audience is to believe that leaving Yale Law School and forgoing politics back in Illinois were moral decisions for which we all are forever in her debt. Like Bill, she has suffered for all of us.
2. There is really not much of a social safety network for anyone. We may be giving half our incomes over to federal, state, and local taxes, spending 70% of our budget on social programs, and at the apex of large government in our history, but none of this is adequate. Instead, veterans, children, the poor, and aged, all of them are simply being neglected—and only Hillary has the savvy to create enough new social programs to save those who need to be saved. Any social pathology is entirely due to collective indifference or government neglect. Since the individual through drunkenness, drug use, ignorance, evil, or selfishness is never responsible for the results of his pathology, it would be silly to ask of him to clean up his own mess.
3. Almost every anecdote is prefaced by “When I was Governor, Hillary…” or “When I was president, she…” By implicit assumption, if we vote for Hillary we are voting in name for a co-presidency, but in fact, for a third and fourth term for Bill.
4. The problem is not that Bill Clinton occasionally lies—he does. But instead, almost serially he exaggerates and fudges—and in ways beyond not inhaling or redefining “is”, or insisting oral sex is not sex. The result is a Forrest Gump like effect, that we are to believe he and Hillary were the font of every almost every liberal gift of the last quarter-century—Yale, then Arkansas being the Mecca of social change.
5. It would be cruel, but understandable to ask amid these long encomia on Hillary’s character, her talent, and her morality—prefaced by Bill’s commentary that he almost alone realized her singular gifts, why in the world, then, did he spend over thirty years trying to escape her in almost every way imaginable? Why if she walked on water, did he find company, carnality, conversation with Paula Jones or Gennifer Flowers, or feel the need to talk trash and more with Monica? In other words, he is asking the voter to take on a partnership, a political marriage if you will, that he, mutatis mutandis, never would or has. It reminds me of the last time I bought a Chevy S-10. The local Selma salesman went on at great length about its reliability, its power, and economy, its great price, and then I asked him whose small, like-sized Toyota Tacoma was parked nearby and was it for sale? No need to tell you to whom it belonged. |
