When good people make bad choices [View All]

[Alcibiades]

I now support Obama, and have since a couple of weeks after John Edwards dropped out of the race. Clinton was right on healthcare, but wrong on the war. Handing the legal authority to invade Iraq made no sense given what most of us realized at about the chimp at the time. My candidate, Edwards, misunderestimated him. Clinton misunderestimated him. Obama didn't. He knew him for what he was: a drunken fratboy who wears his fake Christianity like a breastplate of righteousness while actually pandering to special interests and pursuing an ill-conceived war for political gain. That was good judgment on his part.

As the Clinton campaign has worn on with their poll-driven divisiveness and ever more tenuous arguments about how Senator Clinton will make a better candidate against John McCain, we are confronted with the contradictory evidence of her poor decision making, beginning with the selection of expensive advisors who don't know about proportionality, advisors who told her that running like a Republican was a smart idea, a good way to win a Democratic primary. Presumably, they thought that by going right in the primary they would be in a better position in the fall, but they miscalculated in that it would have been better to run as a liberal to appeal to primary voters and then make a right turn (if needed, which I don't think it is) in the fall. They just made some bad choices from the beginning of the campaign, choices that have gotten worse as time goes on.

And yet, I feel that Clinton must get it. She needs to reconnect with who she was in 1968. There's an idea in our culture that adversity makes you stronger, but that's not always the case. Plato, in the Republic, writes that some kinds of adversity can actually demean you, which is why he argued that people who do manual labor should have no part in governing, as he felt that the slavelike conditions of those days for free workers (let alone the slaves who were probably at least as numerous) left their character in a degraded condition. Obviously, I want no part of that bit of the argument, but I do think there's a kernel of truth: did the politics of personal destruction the Clintons underwent do something to them, to her? It would be bad enough to have these sort of problems in one's marriage, but to have it play out in the national press, and to become an issue of great political importance, to have to take the position that it does not really matter if your husband screws around on you--did that change her? I sometime wonder what the young Hillary Clinton would have made of some of these choices they have made in the campaign. I think she needs to take some time to reconnect with her better self.