The New Nixon

AND DOWN THE TOILET is where we are, for sure. Watching Barack Obama in Nevada gave me a sick feeling. I bought the hype, and now I could see the straw sticking out of his suit.

Here's Obama, a black man, coming into a crucial debate having watched his white opponent and her henchmen slyly remind voters about what he was doing "in the neighborhood" as a kid and then point out that MLK couldn't secure his legacy without the help of a white man with a title. It was nasty, calculating politics, and any man with a pulse would have taken her to task for it here. But in the debate, Obama responded meekly by praising Hillary three times in the first five minutes, avoiding the word "black" as though it were a used Kleenex, and refusing to point out that he'd ever been against the war in Iraq.

While Obama — apparently spooked back into say-no-evil "general election mode" by his New Hampshire ass-whippings — bared his vagina to the state of Nevada, Hillary coolly mopped the floor with him. She refused an invitation to describe him as "prepared" for the presidency — a slight that was especially biting given that Obama had just moments before described his opponents as "capable" — and reminded voters that her opponents might not be prepared enough to save them from two wars, a foreclosure crisis, a recession, terrorist threats and a host of other scary shit.

Afterward, audience members had trouble identifying just what it was that they were left to choose between. "Before I came here I was vacillating between the two," Jocelyn Cortez, a civil rights lawyer in Vegas, tells me. "But I think Clinton did a really good job of giving us concrete elements of her plan."

Like what?

"Um, like, she was saying, I think she was going to set aside a certain amount of money for, um . . . I think it was for, like, a bank to help people. . . . It's kinda weird, but it was like the numbers spoke to me, the fact that she had thought about these numbers. And I love Obama, I think he's a great orator, but sometimes I think he went a little overboard with the, uh. . . ."

"The what?"

"The oral beautification of the whole thing."

Right, that. The whole prose-not-poetry deal. It's working for Hillary, just like her tears gambit worked. After all these years in public life, the only time Hillary Clinton sheds a tear is when her own political career is on the line? I didn't notice her crying when kids started coming home from Fallujah in rubber bags because of a war she voted for.

That was where it all came rushing back. Hillary's stunning victory had been in the books for mere minutes before we were all suddenly reminded of all the reasons we came to hate the Clintons over the years — why there were scores of very smart people who by November 2000 were actually willing to pull a lever for Ralph Nader rather than go anywhere near a Democratic Party ticket. Seven years is, it turns out, a long time, just long enough to forget that Clinton fatigue was what saddled us with George Bush in the first place.

The crying incident was Hillary's own personal Checkers speech, a painful bit of self-mutilation tossed off on the last step before the political gallows — a pure sea-cucumber tactic, scaring us off with a display of vulnerable green guts. We missed the chance to finish her off, and now she's back in charge, setting the tone for a campaign that gets dumber and meaner and dirtier by the day. Thanks to you, New Hampshire, the Clintons still have us to kick around.

[From Issue 1045 — February 7, 2008]

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