Village rising
by digby
I wrote about the sad performance of the media on the Sunday shows in discussing the Clinton email pseudo-scandal for Salon this morning. I also explore the Clinton scandal phenomenon in general, how they tend to unfold in the Village and how the American people react. This is an excerpt:
One of the major effects of the patented “Clinton Scandal” that’s become a fixture of political conversation over the past two decades is the helplessness in engenders in Democrats who feel like they are swimming in quicksand trying to make sense of the whole thing. They know it’s not a real scandal, and yet the press is blatantly aroused by the opportunity to speculate wildly about “what it all means” while the Republicans smugly repeat their talking points with robotic military precision. But again, that’s the point. It’s even got a name: “Clinton Fatigue,” which Charles Krauthammer, among others, declared was already in full effect many months ago:
Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history.
Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay. It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.
You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.
You know that Charles Krauthammer only has the best interests of the Democratic party at heart, right? You can almost hear him laughing maniacally as he wrote that.
I know many Democrats would have loved to see Elizabeth Warren run, and many women, including yours truly, especially would have been thrilled to see two such formidable women leaders go head to head on the campaign trail. And Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are welcome to join in too, as is any other Democrats who wants to try his or her hand. This is democracy and nobody’s automatically entitled to be president.
But there are millions of Democrats who also really don’t like the idea that Republicans are manipulating the system to choose their own rival and neither do they care for the media deciding who should be running on a Democratic ticket. And that’s very much what’s going on here. The Benghazi investigations are a joke, but they are providing the GOP with a excuse to go nosing around in Clinton’s business in a way that gives them access to information they can dribble out over time to create the atmosphere I describe. The political press is, as usual, helping to do their dirty work for them. They are Ahab’s obsessively chasing their white whale with visions of Pulitzers dancing in their heads.
The pundits all assumed that President Clinton would have to resign in 1998, but they underestimated the people they were dealing with. I’m not talking about the Clintons, I’m talking about the American people — who, unlike the beltway elites who get nervous at the sound of a loud noise, tend to respond to this political gambit with a stubborn insistence that they should be the ones to make these judgements and choose their own leaders.
Democratic primary voters may very well decide they don’t want Clinton as the nominee for president. But it’s highly doubtful they want a bunch of beltway elites and Republicans telling them they can’t have her. Indeed, unlike the establishment, it tends to energize them to do the opposite. Just ask Newt Gingrich who lost his Speakership when he bet the House in 1998 on Clinton being vanquished by Ken Starr.