Hillary Clinton for President

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The world may still face all kinds of economic upheavals, as the panic from the American subprime mortgage sector spreads around the world, like a kind of financial BSE

To ask the reader to support Hillary means asking you to forget all those worrying allegations …and the Whitewater real estate imbroglio.

it is time America once again radiated a generous understanding of the rest of the world

it is time to think of supporting Hillary, not because we necessarily want her for herself but because we want Bill in the role of First Husband

I want Hillary Clinton to be president

You know, I never thought it would come to this. Over the past 24 hours I have been trying to imagine the kind of person I want to follow George W Bush into the White House.

I have been scanning the faces of the competitors for what some have called the most open presidential race for years, and I have screwed up my eyes and tried to work out who should be in charge of us all.

Who should have their finger on the nuclear button? Who should be Commander-in-Chief of the American military, the hugest and most lethal killing machine in history?

The world may still face all kinds of economic upheavals, as the panic from the American subprime mortgage sector spreads around the world, like a kind of financial BSE. Whose brain can we rely on to protect us?

I hum and I brood and then to my amazement a face seems to form in my mind’s eye. She’s got dyed blonde hair and pouty lips, and a steely blue stare, like a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital; and as I snap out of my trance I slap my forehead in astonishment.

How can I possibly want Hillary? I mean, she represents, on the face of it, everything I came into politics to oppose: not just a general desire to raise taxes and nationalise things, but an all-round purse-lipped political correctness.

To express approval of Hillary Clinton is to invite fury from my friends in the American Republican party.


To ask the reader to support Hillary means asking you to forget all those worrying allegations that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard used to report so brilliantly in these pages: the funny goings-on with the White House travel office, the anomalies in the position of poor Vince Foster’s gun, the curious business of the drug-runners at the Rena airfield and the Whitewater real estate imbroglio.

How could I possibly emit the merest peep of support for a woman who seems to have acted out the role of First Lady, from 1993 to 2000, like a mixture between Cherie Blair and Lady Macbeth, stamping her heel, bawling out subordinates and frisbeeing ashtrays at her erring husband?

Supporting Hillary means passing over the powerful claims of other good candidates. There is the plainly brilliant Barack Obama; there is the chap who acted in the Hunt for Red October, and above all there is Rudy Giuliani. How can we prefer Hillary to the man who did so much to sort out violent crime on the streets of New York?

The answer is that we should certainly venerate Giuliani’s achievement, and the former Mayor of New York has much to teach any London mayor about the importance of getting police out on the streets.

But with the deepest respect to Rudy, he has one disadvantage over Hillary. Unless I am much mistaken, the Clinton marriage is still standing, a shell-scarred monument to the triumph of hope over experience; and the nub of the matter is that I am prepared to pay the price of supporting Hillary just to get Bill Clinton once again padding over the shag pile carpet of the Oval Office, even if it is only to bring his wife a cup of tea.

It seems so long ago, but do you remember how the world felt in the 1990s? There was a time when it was possible to support America exuberantly and unashamedly, and part of the reason was that the Presidency was held by a man of high intelligence and terrific political skill.

Though it pains me to say it, Tony Blair was a pretty smart operator. But I was lucky enough to watch several Blair-Clinton press conferences, and Bill made Tony look like a novice.

I remember a time when Clinton came to Belfast, and gave a speech of such sensitivity and understanding that he had virtually everyone purring with approval, from Paisley to Sinn Fein.

With the best will in the world, it is hard to imagine George Bush descanting with such fluency on any international topic. This is a man who believed until recently that the people of Athens are called “Grecians”.

After all these years of tough-guy stuff from the Neocons, it is time America once again radiated a generous understanding of the rest of the world. Take Syria, a place struggling to cope with more than a million refugees from Iraq, as a result of the ill-starred invasion.

I listen to Dubya starting to rev up the rhetoric against this member of the “Axis of Evil”, and I cannot for the life of me see what good can come of it. When I hear the Bush White House proposing to bomb Iran, I yearn for someone with the wit to offer a more sensible approach.

Of course Hillary has been careful not to be too soft, and she too has rattled the sabre against Iran. But I somehow feel that with Bill at her side, with all his experience, and with his well-stocked mind spooling through the options, America is less likely to do something rash and counter-productive.

The opponents of Clinton will say that he has nothing to teach Bush, and that it was his own laxness that allowed Bin Laden to flourish, and some will say that it was Clinton who allowed Afghanistan to get out of control.

But whatever the strength of that case, I can’t imagine that Bill Clinton would have made such a supreme hash of America’s response to 9/11. He was and is a master of language, and would never have been so cloth-eared to call for a “crusade”, given the connotations of that word to a Muslim ear.

He would never have informed the world that “if you are not with us, you are against us” or landed on an aircraft carrier to announce “mission accomplished”.

For all who love America, it is time to think of supporting Hillary, not because we necessarily want her for herself but because we want Bill in the role of First Husband. And if Bill can deal with Hillary, he can surely deal with any global crisis.

29 thoughts on “Hillary Clinton for President”

  1. I used to regularly follow this blog through its RSS feed – but it doesn’t seem to have been working for the last couple of months. I’ve tried reinstalling the feed etc., all to no avail. Is there a technical problem that you are aware of?

    Rob
    [Ed: Thanks Rob… Keep writing. More later]

  2. Fantastic article. Totally agree!!!

    P.S> Can you post a link to order “Back Boris” stickers for the campaign for Mayor of London. thanks

    [Ed: will enquire…]

  3. Has Boris finally taken leave of his senses? Perhaps he ought to do this little quiz and then think about what it means to be a Conservative. C’mon, Boris, let’s play…

    Who said it?

    1) “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

    A. Karl Marx
    B. Adolph Hitler
    C. Joseph Stalin
    D. None of the above

    2) “It’s time for a new beginning, for an end to government of the few, by the few, and for the few… And to replace it with shared responsibility for shared prosperity.”

    A. Lenin
    B. Mussolini
    C. Idi Amin
    D. None of the Above

    3) “(We)… can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”

    A. Nikita Khrushev
    B. Josef Goebbels
    C. Boris Yeltsin
    D. None of the above

    4) “We have to build a political consensus and that requires people to give up a little bit of their own… in order to create this common ground.”

    A. Mao Tse Dung
    B. Hugo Chavez
    C. Kim Jong Il
    D. None of the above

    5) “I certainly think the free-market has failed.”

    A. Karl Marx
    B. Lenin
    C. Molotov
    D. None of the above

    6) “I think it’s time to send a clear message to what has become the most profitable sector in (the) entire economy that they are being watched.”

    A. Pinochet
    B. Milosevic
    C. Saddam Hussein
    D. None of the above

    Answers

    1) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/29/2004

    2) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 5/29/2007

    3) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007

    4) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007

    5) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 6/4/2007

    6) D. None of the above. Statement was made by Hillary Clinton 9/2/2005

    The last thing we need is this personification of political correctness and the politics of envy bossing us all around for up to eight years…

  4. OK, Boris: what can the UK learn? Mayor Rudy was responsible for such a change in behaviour that I immediately handed over my barclaycard to a complete barndoor of a man at near midnight when stranded with no luggage (grrrr BA!!!). I got the right ticket and then had a policeman greet me civilly and sort me out for Amtrak. That’s New York??? I would not do that in London.

    Ms Clinton was on the campaign trail and I literally bumped into her trying to get back to my hotel room in a place where there was no alternative route. The minders and the dogs were friendly. She laughed and was politely embarrassed as she grasped the situation. There were no huge ‘Guess who’s here’ signs. I carried on and then realised, ‘That was…’ No pc-pursed-upness there – just a normal person off-guard and friendly.

    As you well know, international relations do need a huge amount of effort. In the US, the Clintons have both brains and a well-used atlas. In the UK, are brains going to only the metropolitan?

  5. Mr Clinton bombed Serbia for the deliberate purpose of helping a KLA he proveably knew to be the only ones engaged in genocide in Kosovo, apparently for the purpose of getting his adultery off the TV.

    However bad the attack on Iraq & any possible action against Iran may be (& I have opposed it from the start) it is neither legally nor morally remotely as evil as what he did in Krajina & Kosovo. Though I grant that, by being willing to practice genocide & ethnic cleansing Clinton has had a greater measure of success.

    In any decent society he would be at the end of a rope. If his partner in crime gets the job the chances of US state sponsored genocide elsewhere in the world happening again are very high indeed & the world will be a much more dangerous place. When the world rewards criminals you get more crime.

  6. Welcome to the big tent. Good to see a politician who thinks for himself rather than take the line he is expected to. I think it is possible to have ones own opinions and still be loyal to the party of ones choice. I think that the public are put off by personality less politicians unable to think for themselves who blindly follow the party line. Politics needs more people like Boris. If this were the case interest in politics and turnout at elections would be far higher than they are.

  7. I can’t stand any of the candidates. They all seem to want to attack Iran. Except Ron Paul.

  8. Mr. Johnson,

    I invite you to spend some time with me in Cooperstown, New York – I could take you on a wonderful tour that would show quite clearly how Senator Clinton has made the lives of rural New Yorkers less palatable. She’s hindered our progress toward delivering quality, affordable public education from the primary years through the offerings of our State University system.

    … and for those reasons, not partisan loyalties, I’d rather not see Senator Clinton lead our country. But, as always, I appreciate your thoughts.

    Matthew K. Tabor

  9. I second ‘what about Ron Paul?’ One of only three people out of the entire presidential field who could pass an IQ test, and probably the only one who could do well on it.

  10. Can I briefly go off-topic. Whatever you think about Heather Mills McCartney, should Jonathan Ross be allowed to get away with mocking her for having only 1 leg having lost one in a terrible accident? When did it become OK to make nasty bullying jokes about a disability that must be absolutely awful to live with? It’s new in my lifetime anyway.

    Some of this must filter down into schools, and indeed the rest of society, so we end up living in a nastier and less caring country.

  11. Goog site, fair play.

    I’m sorry, but as far as i can see, there is only ONE person who should take over the ‘dictator in cheif’ and that is Ron Paul… I wont go into why, find out for yourselves, but in a nut shell, he seems a very normal, logical chap, who is the only candidate promoting actual democracy and freedom, and he is a very rare politician, he tells it like it is and is against the current ‘fascist corporate’ takeover of the world.

    Hilary on the other hand, is being endorsed by Dubya, one reason among many NOT to vote for her.

  12. “After all these years of tough-guy stuff from the Neocons, it is time America once again radiated a generous understanding of the rest of the world.” (Boris)

    I dunno, I was pretty shocked by the ‘tough-guy stuff from the Neocons’ when it all started at the tender age of 21, but I warmed to it eventually and I think I’ll miss them when they are gone, especially if Hillary C is really as wishy-washy as the comment section of the Guardian.

    These days, I must admit, I enjoy George W’s speeches about the terrorists, their sympathisers and their ‘ideology of darkness’. George W makes a complicated world seem so simple.

    George W’s ‘War on Terror’ has been an interesting, if somewhat confusing, era to pass from adolescence to young adulthood to say the least.

    I feel a tad sorry for him now, reduced to a lame duck, ruffling his feathers in the direction of Iran whilst sitting on a twenty-nine per cent approval rating.

    I can’t help thinking how things would have been different if we hadn’t all so rudely laughed at, and mocked George W in the first year or so of his presidency. How things would be if every nation in the EU had backed his ‘coalition of the willing’ as much as the US public did in those dark days post 9/11.

    George W certainly had a vision, but perhaps our snobby European negativity towards Uncle Sam and intellectual arrogance are as much to blame for his failure to realise his vision as his brash Texan mannerisms and poor choice of words.

  13. From a tory perspective I can see why Hillary would be appealing. Tories are pretty similar to centrist Dems in the States. As an American expat I ran away from “centrists” like Hillary and I find her frighteningly conservative and just not very appealing. A Thatcher for the 21st century – but you are a Tory, so fair enough.

  14. Boris if you back Hillary I guess I won’t be backing you for Mayor because quite obviously you have, finally, taken leave of your senses. IF you haven’t noticed there are 3 or 4 (depending on whose counting) front runners on the Republican ticket. If you are basing your love of the Clinton’s on their battered marriage why not back Romney who has had only one beautiful, so far as we know, un-battered wife ?? Or is it because you have behaved in your marriage more like Bill then Mitt and it will make YOU feel more comfortable to have the philanderer back in the White House. Pre 9/11 cannot be compared to now ! How nieve are you? Clinton’s years ran so smoothly because he rode the economic coattails of Reagan, Bush 1 and Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America! I don’t know many people who were not ashamed to have a man like Bill and his inability to keep his pants on as America’s leader. Maybe this article is one of your faux pas moments and you will come back and apologise like you did the the citizens of Liverpool?

  15. One assumes this article came about because Boris thought this idea was rather original and clever:

    “not because we necessarily want her for herself but because we want Bill in the role of First Husband”

  16. “Maybe this article is one of your faux pas moments and you will come back and apologise like you did the the citizens of Liverpool?” (Louise)

    I seem to remember Boris exclaiming that there would be ‘no more apologies’ to rapturous aplause at the 2006 Tory conference. Quite right too!

    I never apologise (and never would) for venturing an opinion into the fray, why exactly should Boris have to apologise for pioneering, and providing the medium for such debates?

    If you don’t like the opinion that Boris, or anyone else, has expressed feel free to say so, but don’t expect an apology!

  17. Louise,
    JFK is not exactly known for keeping his pants on yet he is loved in the US, so it seems odd that people would be ashamed of Bill Clinton, whose trouserless escapades were not nearly as bad as JFK’s were reported as being. Besides, who cares about one very mild sex scandal, Bill Clinton was a good president, and Hilary Clinton promises to be just as good. The quotes Julian Cox uses against Hilary Clinton seem to me to support her instead.
    And I fail to see why Boris should apoligize for supporting her. What next make all American votes registar who they vote for so if they vote for the loser they can be rounded up and made to aplogize to the supporters of the winner.

  18. JFK wasn’t quite the sleazeball that is Bill Clinton (and his women were classier). More importantly, he was assassinated – which sent him sky-high into the hero/martyr popularity stakes.

    As for the loves and hates of the American people – their polarisation is schizoid at best.

  19. George W certainly had a vision, but perhaps our snobby European negativity towards Uncle Sam and intellectual arrogance are as much to blame for his failure to realise his vision as his brash Texan mannerisms and poor choice of words.

    No, it’s not snobby to think that the president of the United States should:

    a. know how to act like a civilized human being
    b. have half a brain in his head
    c. have some knowledge of the world around him (clearing brush on the ranch doesn’t count)

    George Bush is a stupid and — perhaps more importantly — gullible man, too easily led around like a goat on a leash by his handlers while they do the dirty work behind the scenes. I, for one, am ashamed that he is the public face of my country to the world.

    I can’t help thinking how things would have been different if we hadn’t all so rudely laughed at, and mocked George W in the first year or so of his presidency.

    He deserved it, Steven! The man is a dim bulb! The lead up to the 2000 election in the US media was an exercise in freezing out the intelligent (but perceived as cold or wooden) Al Gore in favor of “well, I’d like to have a beer with him!” George Bush. Seriously — more than once was that reference made!

    Politics is not — or at least shouldn’t always — be about personality, it should be about capability and intellect. I’ll take a Clinton, any Clinton, over Bush any day.

  20. The 42nd president may look good when considering the 43rd, but his Rwanda policy (do nothing about genocide), and his facilitation of the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo’s Serbs (many of whom had been our WW2 allies) make him difficult to support unless the alternatives are dire.

  21. Right on Boris! She’s by far the most fanciable of the ones mentioned. Well … perhaps not to a LibDem politician.

  22. Boris,

    A clouding of judgment seems to have occurred.

    There are a number of self help books available aimed at helping those who have momentarily fallen for the wrong woman. One I would recommend, “Help! I have The Hots For Mrs Clinton”

    I do understand because for sure a powerful woman can be rather sexy, but no, Mrs clinton will steal your liberties faster than Mcbroon and Blour ever could and that is not sexy.

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