Frank Rich used to wield an awesome power among Broadway's creative corps and financiers, able to close a heavily-financed show with the swipe of his fingers across the keyboard on West 43rd Street. But as a political columnist, Rich has moved from the knife's edge of powerful daily criticism to the backwash of a flabby Sunday Times column that regurgitates what we knew the week before last, applying a more-nuanced perspective to the political maelstrom. In truth, this can be valuable in longer, insightful looks at large issues, like the Iraq war or the economy. But in trying to write the elegy for Senator Clinton's presidential campaign, Rich looks like he's trying to close Les Miserables during previews.
Indeed, this weekend seems to be the time for the wishful political obituary where Hillary Clinton is concerned. But the Clinton haters in the Obama campaign and the Republican Party (a fascinating team of strangely-synced bedfellows of late) are whistling by the headstones before the calendar even shows 2008. Frank Rich may be the most elegant writer trying to close the Hillary Clinton show and consign it to the graveyard, but even he looks clumsy, ham-handed, and intellectually pathetic in reviewing a production that may well have more than 3,000 nights left to run.
Today, Rich joined the hypersexual fantasist Maureen Dowd in the Obama '08 propaganda bureau - otherwise known as the Times Op-Ed page minus Paul Krugman - in finding some pop psychology meaning in this year's polls, and you know, it just happens that this quackery tells him Clinton's experience may be trumped with the authenticity of Obama's calls for change. Disguising his last-minute salvo at Senator Clinton in a lead about McCain and Huckabee (like he cares), Rich quickly veers into the real reason for his column - a last pre-Christmas attack that may have some effect on the January 3rd vote in Iowa.
Experience, the experienced 60-something Times observer actually opines, is "toxic" in the 2008 election, linking both Bill and Hillary Clinton to the experience of John McCain and George W. Bush. Citing nothing other than his thumb in the wind, Rich then proclaims that if Bill Clinton hails his wife's resume, her knowledge of policy, and her travails in American politics as strengths, the 42nd President has pretty much lost his political touch.
Attention Bill Clinton: If that’s what this election is about, it’s already over. No matter how much Hillary Clinton, Mr. McCain or Rudy Giuliani brag about being tested and vetted, it’s not experience that will be decisive in determining the next president.
See how cleverly Rich links Clinton with two prominent Republicans? But Rich has a further linkage in mind - one that is almost an obscenity to the kind of Democrats who vote in primaries. Recounting the controversial statements of Bill Shaheen and Bob Kerrey, Rich spits on a leading Democratic candidate thusly: "The Clinton-camp denials that these tactics have been “authorized” sound like Karl Rove’s denials of similar smear campaigns against John McCain in 2000."
Hung up over the Clintons' marriage as Frank Rich is, just across the page his intellectual doppelganger (though you could also make that claim for Chris Matthews, Michael Goodwin and Andrew Sullivan) is the twisted, Gollum-like MoDo, caressing her Clinton hatred like "the precious." Of course, Dowd is back on her obsession with the "conjugal psychodrama" of the Clintons; it amazes me that the Sulzbergers pay her to write the same unoriginal sex column week after week. You know the drill: blind "friends of the Clintons" quotes, unsourced bimbo eruption libel, oh-so-clever references to skirts and cigars. For God's sake Maureen, put the robe back on - we've seen it all before.
This fall has been about a concerted effort of a large section of the national media to derail the Hillary Clinton express. You can see it in the spit that literally rises to the lips of Chris Matthews when he desperately - and with that shrill, feminine cackle of his - plays up any gotcha moment the campaign provides. You can see it the faux dese-dems-dose Archie Bunker populism of the effete, cuff-linked Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News. And you can feel it in the anti-feminism served up as commentary by Andrew Sullivan, who actually uses the "some of my favorite public figures are women" defense today on his blog, before serving up the names of Margaret Thatcher and Condi Rice as paradigms of political women, people whose example in public life whose inspiration now leads him to support Barack Obama.
Yet, Hillary is still on the rails. This weekend, John Sasso (who ran the Kerry and Dukakis campaigns and knows something about the right-wing attack machine) contributed a sober analysis of the campaign to the Boston Globe. His take? That Clinton's rough ride is helping her make the case for her Presidency, that she'll be a better, tougher candidate in the long run:
Today Clinton has forged herself into a formidable political leader. She has undergone a remarkable journey. In the face of unending autopsies on her personal and political past, unrelieved targeting at both Democratic and Republican debates, the punishing demands imposed on a woman candidate, she is still standing unflinchingly in place.
....Why the most electable Democrat? Because after a year of being tightly measured, Clinton has won a public acceptance that she has the intellect and inner confidence to do the job. She has reached beyond her political inheritance and shaped a political presence all her own. Hillary belittlers still abound, to be sure. She is still caricatured as calculating. But the senator has taken on some different markings. Gone is the defensive bite, on hand is a new openness to concede mistakes, often with glints of humor.
