The Greatness of Hillary Clinton

Senator Hillary Clinton is now neck-and-neck with Illinois Senator Barack Obama going into today's Super Tuesday contests, after what has been a hard-fought, turbulent campaign so far. Unless you live in a cave, you know that every move the candidates make, or the candidates' staffers, or their cousins, has been scrutinized and magnified by our conflict-starved news media, and the din from both camps of supporters has reach supersonic pitch.

It is easy to lose perspective at a time like this. A lot of criticism has been leveled at Hillary Clinton, some of it fair, most of it not. If you are an Obama or former Edwards supporter, you might feel the need to tear down their opponent out of a belief in your candidate, rather than explore why you may agree with all 3, but with your guy more. No matter what happens today, I think it needs to be remembered that Hillary Clinton is a great American, a pioneer, and in my view, would have gone just as far or farther had she never even met William Jefferson Clinton.

I think Hillary says it best when she says, "I may be the most famous person that you don't really know." The level of bile and hatred that has been spewed at her, dating back to her husband's first term, is truly astounding, and it is clearly motivated out of a fear of women.

I first became aware of a Hillary backlash when she began working on the Clinton healthcare plan in 1993. Hard to believe that was 15 years ago, but looking at that plan now, even if you disagree with it, you have to admit it was a bold and pioneering step toward addressing one of the major issues of our time. Almost immediately, the cry of, "Who does she think she is?" went up all across the airwaves.

From then on, the narrative on Hillary Clinton was set. Every misogynistic cliché in the book was applied to her. Some at least bothered to mask this with an ostensible concern about her not having been elected, but that was a thin veil indeed. Of course, her plan was defeated by the Republicans and the health insurance industry, and labeled a failure in the press.

Since then, she has weathered a never-ending tsunami of scrutiny and criticism and hate from every quarter. What always surprised me was that the most virulent reactions to Hillary came from women that I knew, even before the Lewinsky scandal. Perhaps she represented a challenge to them to overcome their own marginalization.

Then there was that "scandal." To this day, I can't figure out why, even if you cared about that business, why would anyone be resentful of Hillary? I remember at the time being so impressed with her composure in the face of all of that adversity. I was no fan of Bill Clinton, whom I felt did too much to appease the extreme right wing at our country's peril, but I was always impressed by Hillary.

She ran for Senate in New York at the end of her husband's term, and suddenly, everyone was calling her a "carpetbagger." I had to run and get my English-to-1930s-Slang dictionary. (Roget's puts it out) But as she campaigned, a funny thing happened. People liked her. She won the election, becoming the first woman Senator from New York.

For me, the erosion of my support for Hillary was a slow process that began with this country's drastic shift to the right in the wake of 9/11. The events that unfolded after that pushed me to more progressive politics, and I saw Hillary as part of the wing of the Democratic Party that stood in the way of progressives like Howard Dean. To be clear, I didn't move left as much as the country moved right and I ended up on the left. For a long time, I bought into a lot of the left's anti-Hillary rhetoric.

Hillary makes a strong argument that her ability to appease those elements, and to weather attacks from the extreme right, make her an effective agent to enact practical changes. There's validity to both arguments, really. For me this election is not about who I agree and disagree with, but rather with whom do I agree more? After last week's debate, the choice isn't so clear to me anymore, but it is also beginning to look as though both of these candidates will end up on the ticket, anyway.

Whomever you vote for today, just think about what you were doing in 1973, what your mom was doing, what your buddy's mom was doing. More to the point, what they were allowed to do. Hillary was graduating from Yale Law School. You can google a long list of her accomplishments, I won't waste time listing them, because they are tangential to the essence of my argument.

Hillary Clinton is a force of nature. When I saw her at the debate last week, it rekindled in me the admiration that I had felt for so long. I still have political and philosophical disagreements with her, although I do think she exposed a weakness in Obama's healthcare plan, and she may not get my vote, but I sure do think she's a great American. I don't see how you can deny that she would have been as successful, or more so, had she not been First Lady. She has something innate that drives her to lead.

You can disagree with her politics, or with some of her campaign strategy, or her overarching philosophy, but if you want to talk about "fishwives" or cackling or crying, man, do I not want to hear it. History will record Hillary Clinton as a great American and a pioneer, and possibly the first woman President, or Vice President. History will record those who smeared her with misogyny as clowns.