Beware of White Men Bearing Gifts

I've never bought the pre-championship palaver that the Republicans were itching keen to face Hillary Clinton in the fall, that her mere presence in the race would energize their white-dumpling demoralized base into mobilizing into peasant mobs ready to storm Frankenstein's castle. The party's true savants had underestimated Hillary when she first ran for Senate and saw Rick Lazio's ears get pinned to the mat, and were unlikely to duplicate that error. I believe that they're far more wary of the Clinton machine than the Obama phenomenon because a phenomenon can be pricked or pop of its own accord, leaving behind a melting irridescence, whereas a machine like Clinton's feeds on the negativity thrown at it, a juggernaut nightmare designed to keep the opposition guessing over every move and plunge Andrew Sullivan into clammy angst ("I woke up in a cold sweat early last Wednesday").

And now along comes Wayne Barrett in The Village Voice, persuasively arguing and methodically documenting that the original Obama infatuation emanating from such untrustworthies as Robert Novak, Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, George Will, and others was indeed a hydra-headed head fake:

Conservative pundits slammed Hillary early and hard, exploiting every opportunity to widen the racial divide among Democrats. Though their party is so white that the networks have no ethnic exit-poll data to analyze, these reliable partisans have expressed shock at a number of supposedly race-baiting Clinton comments, with the New York Post's top campaign columnist even calling Bill and Hillary "modern-day George Wallaces, standing in the White House door."

Once Obama became the apparent nominee, especially after the Wisconsin primary on February 19, these same pundits began turning on him (though, it has now become clear, perhaps a bit prematurely). As often as some of them have declared that Clinton is the most beatable Democrat, their own agenda suggested otherwise. [my italics] George Will may have inadvertently tipped this card when he wrote after Obama prospered on Super Tuesday: "The Republican Party's not-so-secret weapon always is the Democratic Party, with its entertaining thirst for living dangerously." It is possible, of course, that their hatred of the Clintons was all that drove these right-wing pundits in their early targeting of Hillary, but it's more likely that they were collectively so confident of beating the black guy in November that they became his unofficial advance team.

Case in point, consider the backflip performed by William Kristol in his dirtbag birdbath on the Times op-ed page.

Here's how Bill Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard and Fox News' prized analyst, opened his first New York Times op-ed column in January: "Thank you, Senator Obama. You've defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you're about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you." Kristol went on in that column to cite Obama's "ability and charm" and likened the Clinton slayer to Bobby Kennedy in another, calling him "charismatic" twice in the same paragraph, as well as "a skeptic of simple ideological stances, a gifted politician and an anti-politician."


Of course, once Kristol concluded that Obama had the nomination in the bag, he delivered an extraordinary hit piece of his own in the Times. On February 25, Kristol clobbered Obama for removing his lapel flag pin, saying that Obama was "impugning the sincerity or intelligence of those vulgar sorts who still choose" to wear one. He also derided Michelle Obama's statement that she was "really proud of my country" for the "first time" in her adult life. "It is fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain," he said, rushing into the general election as precipitately as he rushed into Baghdad. "But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?"

With their lipless smiles and lidless eyes, conservative connivers don't even bother to disguise their duplicity, so proud and gleeful are they of their little tricks. And why shouldn't they be, when so many liberal bloggers and pundits are ready to fall for them?