Debating Clinton

[TBF]

“If people want to tell me that Hillary would be a less horrid option than whatever profound ghastliness the Republicans throw up, I’ll listen to them respectfully. If they try to tell me there’s something inspiring or transformative about her, I’ll have to wonder what planet they’re on.”

Debating Clinton
Doug Henwood responds to a critical review of his new book on Hillary Clinton.
by Doug Henwood 1/8/16

Katha Pollitt reviews My Turn in the January 25 issue of the Nation. I suppose it’s undignified for an author to take issue with a reviewer, but I’m confident that I can transcend such petty concerns.

< snip >

But as is also typical of the genre, Pollitt makes no serious political case for Clinton’s candidacy. Nor does she really try to rebut my critique of her forty-year record. As someone — I wish I could remember who, sorry — pointed out on Twitter, Hillary’s fans always tout her experience but don’t welcome any scrutiny of her record.

Here it is in a sentence: she represented corporate Arkansas in Little Rock (often in cases involving the state of which her husband was governor), screwed up health care reform as first lady, was a mediocre senator, ran a terrible presidential campaign in 2008, and was an unmemorable but bellicose secretary of state. There’s plenty of detail on all this in the book, as well as on her penchant for secrecy and duplicity. It’d be a pleasant surprise if some of her defenders would engage with this history ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/hillary-bill-clinton-president-my-turn-review-henwood-pollitt/

[guillaumeb]

1. Recommended. Another part of the post....

“His run-through of her imbroglios, from Whitewater to that private e-mail server, is terse and straightforward — the only time he seems really angry is when he charges the Clinton Foundation with bungling its rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti. (At the time, only Bill was at the helm of the foundation, but Henwood argues that Hillary, as secretary of state, urged investment in reconstruction projects that fell far short of what was needed.)”

This bears little resemblance to what I wrote about the Clintons’ doings in Haiti, which were truly grotesque, and very much a joint project of the two of them. Their history with that country — a country whose annual per-capita income is equal to about twelve seconds of her standard speaking fee — goes back to their 1975 honeymoon there.

As secretary of state, she and her underlings enabled a deeply corrupt election, worked to suppress an increase in the minimum wage (of concern to women garment workers, something you’d think feminists would care about), and seriously botched reconstruction after the 2010 earthquake. USAID, an agency under State Department supervision, built horrid housing and deployed toxic trailers to accommodate the displaced — at the same time the embassy in Port-au-Prince commissioned snazzy housing for its staff.

I have read a bit on the Clinton/Haitian reconstruction theme in other venues. But, as the author points out, many uncritical supporters of HRC ignore her actual record and her actual history in favor of a romanticized version, a mythologized version wherein HRC is a liberal savior who will magically get things done in the face of GOP intransigence.