IN THE AGE OF ALL THINGS HILLARY

“You gotta do what you gotta do.”

                 Bill Clinton to Bob Dole, circa 1996

“Everyday Americans need a champion, and I want to be that champion.”

                 Hillary Clinton, April, 2015

Question: what grown up person would attempt to entice potential followers with such transparently phony goo? Answer: someone who will say or do anything to get what she wants.

We are now in the age of “All things Hillary” and its major pastime – Hillary speculation – what will be her latest “brand”, who will her Republican opponent be, what about the deleted emails, can she keep Bill in tow, will she win?  The speculation pushes down, down to the depths of dark suspicion when one contemplates “the details” of what is known about what Hillary actually does – the lies (“the convenience of one [email] device,” “We were under fire in Bosnia”), the opportunism (support for gay marriage in 2013), and hypocrisy (women’s equality and Saudi money for the Clinton Foundation), the incompetence (healthcare reform, early 1990s, Russia, Benghazi),  – and, when one begins to wonder just how many unknown crooked deals, suborned henchmen, and destroyed lives have followed in her wake. Like Husband Bill, she does what she thinks she’s gotta do.   

Consider the breath-taking arrogance of this motif combined with a Jonathan Gruber-like contempt for the “average American” voter in the crosshairs of Ms. Clinton’s cynical campaign positioning.  Gruber and the former First Lady possess some of the same hefty integrity deficits – the conviction that their vastly superior intelligence substitutes perfectly for honesty and transparency, and an irresistible impulse of venality -- favors and influence in exchange for cash. Gruber lined his pockets as a highly paid consultant, aka, front man, for the Democrats early in Obama’s first term as they crafted the Obama Care deception, now immortalized by the President’s infamous imprimatur of dishonesty, “If you like your doctor you can keep your doctor.” Gruber was later captured on a You Tube video bragging about his duplicity and sneering at the rubes he thought he so easily snookered.  Hillary and her spouse have raked in millions of dollars with their Clinton Foundation by fronting for causes whose beneficiaries could only be deeply embarrassed by how the Clinton’s many gross and hypocritical personal and professional dealings openly clash with their façade of philanthropy and mock the humanitarian ideals they pretend to care about. The sometimes comical but troubling conjunction of Hillary’s lofty passion for women’s rights and well-being and Bill’s “un-lofty” passion for women would make for a fascinating study in social pathology – who enables whom?   

No high powered, code-breaking apparatus need be employed to decipher what Hillary has in mind as a “champion for the little guy,” check, I mean “little gal.”  Like her former Boss in the White House she operates with a remarkably unselfconscious, delusional air of superiority and condescension, unable to comprehend how ludicrous the notion is that everyday Americans need or want her or anyone remotely like her in any serious capacity. The ego-charged condescension perfected by President Obama, perhaps is best captured by his humble confession to House Democrats back in 2008: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”   

For both Obama and Hillary America is in a terrible slump out of which only they can lift us. How did their egos become so bloated and how did they achieve such a thorough inoculation from reality? Surrounding themselves by sycophants and power gruppies no doubt richly contributed to the massive ego warping. Also, the years of marinating in the juices of a leftist ideology turns politics into a search for the oppressed and the invention of victim classes – manipulated, helpless, blameless – victims who do not fully grasp the reality of their exploitation, and most importantly, need champions, as Hillary puts it, to affirm their status as victims, stir their righteous resentment and focus it on the oppressors. Resentment mixed with self-righteousness produces the potent cocktail served by the left.  Subtract the resentment, envy, and demonization of the opposition that fuels the post-1970s leftist politics, all that remains is corruption and cynicism. “Everyday Americans need a champion” is Hillary at the apex of her mountainous cynicism.  And the vapid, silly script indicates how stupid she believes the voters must be.   

Perhaps the theme song of the Hillary Clinton campaign should be a 70s tune lifted from the repertoire of one of Bill Clinton’s many “friends”, Barbra Streisand, “People Who Need People” suitably arranged to express the unique Clintonesque sense of noblesse oblige: “We the helpless, average people desperately need Hillary and her special anointed people to be our champions.”  Hillary “in charge” at the helm of the Ship of State means that we will all be “the luckiest people in the world” – lucky, maybe, just like Libyan Ambassador, Chris Stevens and the other three Americans who died in Benghazi – eulogized by Hillary’s “What difference does it make”? or the legion of Clinton associates over the years from Little Rock to Washington DC who ended up dead or in prison – James McDougal, convicted White Water partner, Vince Foster, Hillary Law Partner, Ed Willey – Clinton fund raiser, and Dan Lassater, Clinton supporter and fund-raiser to name a few. 

Hillary as President will be in charge in an East German, Erich Honecker sort of way which in the crudest terms means: “we, the ruling class know what is best for you and you will do what we tell you to do.”  The East German way of equality and plenty for all for Honecker and his CP henchmen also meant for them the enjoyment of an enviable standard of living compared with the “average” East German – better schools for their children, better health care, a different (more flexible) set of rules to maneuver around – sound vaguely familiar? Smarter and highly virtuous, they were entitled to their lofty and comfortable perches and a requirement for telling the truth and following the rules that was just for them … optional. “Entitlement” is also a word often associated with Hillary. 

What might we expect from Hillary Clinton as a champion?  Again, her former Boss provides a preview best captured in his 2010 Univision broadcast to his followers:  “We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” No better concise description could be found for the modus operandi of the Clintons and their brass knuckle political style that seems to resemble a mix of the late Peróns, Juan and Eva, and that wonderful duo of graft and greed, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

Volumes can and have been written about what happens to people who get in Hillary’s way and the occasional woman who deigns to object to Bill’s unwanted attention. Travelgate, for those who may have forgotten, maybe, is Hillary at her best as a champion for the little person. When taking over the White House in 1993 she ordered the firing of travel office director Billy Dale and other long time staffers with the trumped up accusation of “sloppy accounting.” Dale and his staffers were in Hillary’s way since she wanted to give the jobs to her “friends” from Arkansas. To the victors go the spoils, as it were. The staffers were innocent of any wrong doing, but lost their jobs and had their careers ruined. This is old history, but history with the Clintons, their history, does seem to repeat itself in a sleazy, predictable pattern. They do this sort of thing and always get away with it. Why would they change?  Grifting, trimming, lying are written into their political DNA.  It has worked well for them.  

Denied the triumphant return to the White House for the second time, by Trump's “deplorables” and “irredeemables” there is reason to hope that the Age of All Things Hillary is past.  Still, there is Jason in Halloween.   “She's back!” Oh my God!

Evita, I need you: Obama our Juan Perón

Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.

                          Barack Obama

The Party of Justice understands that the function of politics is to raise the grievances of the people and convert them into concrete acts of government.

                                       From the Partido Justicialista  -- founded by Juan Perón

Barack Obama bears a passable resemblance to the Latin demagogue and wrecker of Argentina, Juan Perón, in both style and substance. Perón used the descamisados, the “shirtless ones” to symbolize his affinity with the marginalized elements of Argentina and to justify a war against the rich and advantaged land owners.  Obama has recently identified himself with the shirtless “Occupy Wall Street” protestors against the “One Percent.”  Like Perón, he appears to believe that the economic and social problems his people face are best solved by identifying, isolating and punishing the “greedy” and well-off – the bankers, oil companies and corporations. 

In his recently published book, Redentores: Ideas y Poder en America Latina, the Mexican historian Enrique Krause writes of  Perónism: “Perónism was certainly the first populist regime in Latin America.  It has at least three defining features:  vertical mobilization of the masses; a tendency to place social resentment above the nation’s productive energies (with disastrous economic consequences) and a cult of the leader, in this case Juan and Eva.” * 

The Perón-Obama resemblance lacks only a contemporary Eva, but Obama’s monumental egotism and his unfailing self-adulation might fill this void.  At the age of 47 he had already published two autobiographies. In fact these two books about his favorite subject were the only pieces he has ever authored notwithstanding the fact that he is routinely touted as a “constitutional law scholar.”  The President’s “scholarship” has yet to be discovered anywhere in writing.

The 2008 campaign was America’s first experience with the launching of a “cult of a personality” for one of its own.  In spite of a blank resume with no legislative accomplishments, no executive experience, no serious intellectual or scholarly endeavors and no reservoirs of wisdom gained from national-level, tested political engagement the freshman Senator from Illinois virtually overnight catapulted to the heights of a rock star with all of the glamor and excitement typically associated with new celebrities.  His campaign appearances became media extravaganzas with his special podium designed to look like the presidential seal, a speech given among fake Greek columns in a football stadium, vast mesmerized crowds and swooning young women. Like Perón, Obama was a man of political theater.

Not only were the young people and the Hollywood-limo set smitten with The One.  He was instantaneously crowned by the media establishment as a colossal genius, a miracle man who would heal the deep wounds inflicted on the world by George W. Bush and Dick Chaney.  Evan Thomas, Assistant Managing Editor of Newsweek declared on television that “Obama is like a God standing above the country and a great teacher.”  “Great teacher” with its intimations of superhuman cognitive superiority was one of the standard panegyrics favored in an earlier era by the liegemen of Joseph Stalin and the CPSU controlled press. The Obama campaign was throughout greeted on the media side with Pravda-like rhapsodies from the Obama-smitten commentators.   

After the 2008 election the adulation from the media continued unabated. The new president was immediately compared with Lincoln, FDR and JFK. Presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, on national television was heard to bluster:  “whatever one’s partisan views this is a guy whose IQ is off the charts…”  When pressed by Don Imus who was interviewing him – What is his IQ? -- the Ivy League, sterling-credentialed professor had to cough, gulp, and finally confess that he did not know.

No one, however, was more smitten with Obama than Obama himself.  In one of his many soaring orations during the Presidential Campaign Obama predicted that his election would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal…” a signal of this man’s vast and swollen ego and his delusional perception of his capacities to massively restructure the world that were fed by his entourage of sycophants and groupies.

Once elected, the President was everywhere on news shows, talk-shows, sports shows, late-night television, magazine covers, sharing his persona and imparting his wisdom and advice on every conceivable subject from sports to child rearing to science education. The Norwegians immediately awarded him a Nobel Peace prize for not being George W. Bush and the American now had their very own Caudillo, a self-proclaimed authority on every aspect of American life.

Never was there a greater distance between the rhapsody and the real.  “Hope and Change”, as vacuous as it was cynical, was an anodyne for the largely apolitical middle-America, a successful ploy to convince them that Barack Obama was a wholesome, earnest “change-agent” far above politics as usual.

Obama’s entire career in fact has been shaped and driven largely by resentment and a feeling of being “the other”. Resentment is what makes Obama, Obama.  One merely needs to peruse a few pages of Dreams from my Father to realize that the President’s view of the world growing up was shaped by a deep sense of anger and grievance out of which sprang a life-long affinity for associations with mentors, in writing and in person, with their own highly polished and richly articulated views of America’s many iniquities. The title of his second book, The Audacity of Hope was taken from a sermon by Obama’s spiritual guide of many years, Jeremiah Wright, a gifted professional purveyor of the harshest sort of racial hostility and bitterness.

Obama managed to dissimulate his own resentment during the campaign. His wife, Michelle, in a momentary lapse of candor let it slip when she commented that America was “just downright mean,” that she had “never been proud of her country” until her husband had become a leading Presidential candidate.

Out of this long festering resentment the President has fashioned a Peronist political style that vilifies “the rich” and exploits racial and social grievances.  “We’re gonna  punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” he told his supporters shortly before the Congressional elections of 2010 in a radio interview that aired on Univision. This was the same man who as a candidate had assured prospective voters: “I'm not going to demonize you because you disagree with me....  I don't think the Democrats have a monopoly on wisdom.”   Sometimes President Obama just cannot suppress his “inner-Perón.”

Punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends is the standard modus operandi for every gangster-led governing clique. What Perónism adds is the moralizing cover of Robin Hood – take from the rich and give to the poor.   This is very popular with the poor, of course.  One problem with this is that it is the political bosses who decide who is rich and who is poor and how to even things out just right,  how to make it all “fair.” “Fairness” is the demagogue's tool for converting resentment into righteousness. The other problem is that in the long run everyone but the bosses and their “friends” who “represent” the poor end up poor.

 Using a populist-oriented “fairness” rhetoric as a guise, Obama practices a Caudillo-style politics distributing money, jobs, and political access to his friends, union bosses, and political supporters, spurning legality, tradition and the “transparency” he promised to be the hallmark of his administration.  One of the more spectacular examples of this was the move the President made in 2009 to set aside the normal Chapter Eleven bankruptcy proceedings for GM to restructure its debt using a special set of proceedings crafted by his party men that stiffed the GM bondholders, rewarded the UAW for their political support and put GM under federal control.       

Nearly fifty years after Perón’s death, the Peronistas still rule over the Argentines and carry on with the “loot-and-reward-your-friends” approach to government that Obama has regularized as his own form of statecraft. The current kleptocrat-President, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has just announced her plan to nationalize YPF, Argentina’s largest oil company.  YPF belongs to a Spanish parent company, Repsol, and has operated in Argentina for decades.  S&P’s Rating Services has already lowered Repsol’s long-term credit rating.   Repsol wants ten billion dollars in compensation for what Cristina is taking.  She scorns the request and refuses to pay. Why should she?  Repsol is a big, rich corporation, part of the one per cent, one of the enemies that Obama would like to punish. The Argentines want the company. Who cares anyway about bond holders?  Shearing bond holders is a Peronist tradition. Kirchner has already taken over the national airline and confiscated billions in what were private Argentine pension funds.  She is very popular

Pollster Scott Rasmussen notes that Obama’s support is highest among those who earn less than $20,000 and those who earn more than $100,000, a base that splits between the poor for whom he stokes envy and the well-off who feel guilty.  He too is popular. 

Before November of 2012 Americans might want to look more closely at Argentina as it is today and its history over the past sixty years.  They could be seeing their future.

*From Enrique Krause, Redentores: Ideas y Poder en America Latina, Random House, Mexico, 2011, 313.

“El peronismo fue seguramente el prémire regimen populista de América Latina. Lo caracterizaron al menos tres rasgos: movilización vertical de las mases, tendencia privilegiar la demanda social por encima de las energía productiva de la nación (con desastrosas consecuencias económicas) y, sobre todo, el culto al líder, al caudillo, en este caso a Juan y Eva.”