I keep hearing this a lot but I don’t know if a) it’s true and b) if true, why? From a guy sitting in tropical heat here in the Philippine islands ;), she seems decent enough. What gives?
People attach her to Bill*, who is in turn inevitably connected to Monica Lewinsky. She’s also an aggressive female Senator, which creates perceptions of bitchiness. There’s a lot more to it than that (I think and hope), but there’s the basic gist of it.
*FWIW, I saw a poll a while ago that had Hillary Clinton vs. John McCain losing, and Hillary Rodham Clinton vs. John McCain winning.
Perhaps the answers can be found here:
Thanks. Didn’t see that when I did a search.
Several right-wingers have gone to the trouble to write books blasting her:
The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy’s Dossier on Hillary Clinton, by Amanda B. Carpenter
The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President, by Edward Klein
Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . . , by John Podhoretz
The Case Against Hillary Clinton, by Peggy Noonan
Hillary’s Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton’s Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House, by Carol Limbacher
Hillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton and America’s Demise, by Sheldon Filger
I’ve never read any of these but their very existence is interesting. Nobody on the right has focused such a level of obsessive hatred on Obama or Dean or Edwards or anybody else who might be the Dem candidate in '08. What are they so afraid of?
Folks who hate Bill hated him long before the Lewinsky matter. One of his first acts as president was to appoint Hillary to find out how to fix the health care problems. Many people said, “Hey, I didn’t vote for her. Why can’t she be a traditional first lady, meeting with the Girl Scouts, and wearing a permanent smile?”
Then, during the health care hearings, she stepped on the toes of the drug industry and the insurance industry. They fought back, in TV ads, print ads, and whispering campaigns. Before long, she was known as a lesbian harridan, controlling Bill like a puppeteer. :rolleyes: Every right-wing columnist in the US joined in the game of Kick Hillary, and she became the very devil in high heels. :eek: The folks who hate her do so waaaay out of proportion to any other liberal senator.
Cheesesteak’s opening paragraph in that thread did it for me.
And guess what? Someone from Kansas came here (NC) and won a Senate seat (Liddy Dole).
Oops. Hit ‘submit’ instead of ‘reply.’
I am extremely cynical about politicians, but blatant ‘carpetbagging’ rubs me raw. Plus, my pinko leftist friends, who love her, excorciated Dole for doing the same thing Clinton did.
Having said that, I don’t hate her. Hell, if she runs, I hope she wins. I just don’t think she can.
Maybe she will prove me wrong.
Couple of points:
Hilary is a brilliant lawyer and public policy wonk (I’m explicitly not using “politician” here, but with the idea of “person who serves in policy-shaping public office”). She had a small but significant role in the Watergate investigation, for example, and I gather she helped shape policy in Arkansas entirely separately from her husband.
But more important is to consider the role models she and Bill took: FDR and ER. While WJC was the President, HRC functioned in much the same roles as ER did in her day, helping to shape policy, particularly on the Left. And like ER, she was affable but extremely introverted, not “connecting” with people well on an emotional level – which may have had more than a little to do with FDR and WJC’s infidelities. Also like ER, she was vilified for being an activist First Lady instead of Mme. le Hostess Gracieuse.
However, I’d like to make some observations on Sens. Clinton and Dole. I grew up and spent most of my first 50 years in a small city in upstate New York, 70 miles from the nearest large city. In that entire period, never once did either of the two Senators from New York ever come to town, even for a whirlwind campaign visit. When Hilary ran for office, she spent a day there, and held a public forum to listen to voters’ concerns. (This may have been politically astute – she polled far better than the average Democratic gubernatorial or senatorial candidate; people bought into the fact that she cared enough to come to town and listen.)
And Liddy Dole was born and raised in Salisbury, NC. That she married a man with a political career in Kansas and lived with him there until he retired and they moved back to NC, does not make her “from Kansas.” Her mother continued to live in Salisbury, and Liddy to visit her there at least yearly, throughout her Kansas years. I believe she has her faults, but carpetbagger is not one of them.
Oh, and as for the straightforward OP question: no, she is not “generally hated”. It’s just that the particular faction that is somehow convinced she is Satan on Earth (and to this day none has been able to give me a satisfactory explanation of what makes her be not just wrong, but evil, any more than any other leading political or corporate figure) is extremely prone to wail and rend their garments and tear their hair and gnash their teeth in major mass media.
But they still add up to less than the combination of those indifferent, those who like her, and those who merely oppose or dislike her like a reasonable person would any candidate that’s contrary to their interests or liking, without necessarily hating the person.
I mean, this started with some people even before Bill & Hill had a chance to actually DO anything… even before Bill swore I was hearing RW commentators spewing hatred in the direction of the Clintons with a fervor not heard since the left against Nixon – and by this I mean, not just censure of their conduct and rejection of their policies, but absolute loathing of their persons.
My main problems with HRC:
-the sleazy deals that she and Bill were in on: Whitewater (in which the US taxpayers took a bath-the collapse of Madison S&L; with losses covered by the taxpayers
-her cattle futures trading experiece (with “Red” Bone)-she made $102,000 with a $1000 investment
-canning the White House Travel office staff
-conflict-of-interest legal work (when she was with the crooked Rose Law Firm), while Bill was governor
-the cover-up of the death of Vince Foster-Bernie Nussbaum cleaned up the office and destroyed all the data
She is pretty unscrupulous, but probably no more so than most politicians.
Yep. This is more about Bill than Hillary, I remember right after the 1992 election, one Sunday I was at stake conference[sup]1[/sup], and the stake president gave a talk on sacrifice or service or something, and at the end he said that he had one other thing to add, and said something like this: “I don’t want to get into politics too deeply, but I just feel that the Lord has inspired me to warn you all that the fact that this country would elect an admitted adulterer to be its president is a very grave sign that we’re sinking deeply into iniquity, and we’re going to be seeing the second coming and the destruction of the wicked people of this nation very soon.”
Even as an extremely orthodox Mormon, I thought that was a bit odd. How many of our presidents weren’t adulterers? Did it make it worse because he admitted it?
[sup]1[/sup]in Mormonism, that’s a meeting of a stake – each local group that meets together is a ward, and all the wards in a particular area are a stake. Stake conferences only happen a couple times a year and there were probably 600 people crammed into that gymnasium)
With so much corruption, why didn’t Ken Starr indict the Clintons? Oh yeah, after his investigation he couldn’t find any evidence of wrongdoing.
And the death of Vince Foster was a suicide, no matter what the voices in the tinfoil hats may say.
Personally, I don’t like her. So many people say she is too liberal but I think quite the opposite- she is no liberal and neither was Bill. What I don’t like is her hawkish stand on the Iraq War. For this I cannot excuse or forgive her. In my opinion, if you were a supporter of this war (and by that I mean more than having voted for the so-called war resolution), then you are unfit for public office.
The people of New York hate her so much that they only gave her 69% of the vote in November’s Senate race. Clearly, this woman is unelectable.
American politics are partisan and there are people who are willing to go beyond disagreements over policies and make any opposition into personal attacks. People can’t just disagree with their opponents; they need to demonize them. Clinton was an influential member of a Presidential administration, she’s been a Senator, and she’s an unoffical Presidential candidate. As such she’s been the target of ongoing attacks of this nature.
The reason the conservatives and the Pubbies hate the Clintons is that Clinton was a successful Democratic president elected after Ronald Reagan, at a time when both houses of Congress were controlled by Republicans. Clinton, conservatives feel, consistently thwarted them for eight years and prevented the Republicans from turning America into the land of conservative bliss they had hoped to have.
That’s why they hate Clinton. Of course, they’ve now had six years of control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency and you can see what a great job they’ve done. So all the outrage was for naught. Conservatives’ dreams are unattainable because they are based on, well, bullshit.
Liberal Democrat here and I hate her because I see her as someone without a vision or conviction other than having power. I see her as trying to be whatever she thinks will get her that power.
Those more liberal than me believe her to be a neocon. I do not see that but see her putting on neocon clothing in the service of votes and that she’d put on any other suit that she’d think voters would like to see her in.
She’s no Bill Clinton. She’s as phoney as Edwards and that’s saying a lot.
McCain at least usually says what he really believes (excepting maybe to the Religious Right lately) even if it is stupid conservative mantras. Of course that is what makes him dangerous.
Okay, maybe I don’t hate her, but I do dislike her a lot.
Many former Nixon staffers worked and are working for Bush the lesser, so I don’t think we should forget that the right implied then that the Hillary-led faction of House Judiciary Committee deprived Nixon of the ability to mount an adequate defense. But…
http://mediamatters.org/items/200506230001
The fact was that she was ignored if she proposed that. But I do think the extreme conservatives take as truth that Hilary was one of the unfair reasons Nixon did go down, I do think the hate originated from that and the realization that she started to be a recognized name thanks to the Nixon investigation.
I think they are not fools, they had to take into account the possibility that public investigations on future presidents (with more serious crimes than a burglary) would be coming, I do think all that hatred was and is a “lesson” to all future legal eagles that will go into politics because of the items that will be revealed in future investigations.
If you think this is a lesson many would likely ignore, I think that many IMHO will not, Vince Foster showed with his suicide that not many have the thick skin needed to go into politics in this day.
[url=]Well, in that case . . .
(Please be advised I will be hijacking all Election-2008-related threads in this direction at every conceivable opportunity from now until the primaries.)
Yeah, but New Yorkers love to piss off the rest of the country, on the rare occasions they generously deign to acknowledge the rest of the country exists. 