The Dream Lived..In spite of everything..but it should have been so much better

[SoCalDem]

I originally wrote this after SC, but it's even more fitting now..especially with what has happened recently.. Bill & Hill are now the laughingtocks that the republicans hoped to make them....and they did it all by themselves this time..and irrevocably so.


I am sad about what we "could" have had

Had hubris and raw lust for power not entered into the plan, we could have had the most unified party, and at just the right time.

Bill Clinton left office still popular, his wife went on the be a US senator.... and was easily re-elected. She had won over the most die-hard upper New York conservatives. Almost everyone had good things to say about her as a senator...

For seven and a half years she coyly rebuffed suggestions that she was really just preparing for her own run for the presidency. We all pretty much knew what she had planned... . or was it even HER plan? Was it Bill's plan FOR her? Perhaps as a gesture of contrition for all he has put her though?

HE is the great campaigner..the schmoozer who can talk for hours, sans notes. He's the one with the BIG personality.. Could it have been a way for him to revive his own presidency, and live vicariously though her?

Don't get me wrong... she's a very intelligent woman, and has gotten high marks for her senate tenure, but she also is a controversy magnet, and has extremely high negatives. They may be unfairly attributed to her, but she WAS half of the famous "two for the price of one" team, and she had her own share of bad press and difficulties.

Perhaps they thought that Bill's charisma would automatically transfer to her if she ran. Early on, I sensed that it was not going to happen, and maybe Bill saw it too..That sense of "what do we do now?" might have been what led him (and others) to make rash comments here and there...to plant little seeds of doubt about the worthiness of the person who shocked them all, and became the front runner..

The fact that he was an African-American man, very much LIKE Bill was impossible to miss. Bill Clinton, the so-called "first Black president", who had excellent relationships in one of the most faithfully democratic communities, found himself at a crossroads.. "Burn every bridge" , in order to lessen Obama's appeal, and risk angering the very people he has had such an affinity for for decades, or cede them over to the first really electable African American candidate.. He chose option #1 and got both in return, AND falling popularity for himself.

the pictures we should have/could have seen on the campaign trail look like this:




Obama's campaign could have been the crowning glory for Bill and Hillary.. The older , wiser First Couple, shepherding the next generation.. The culmination of Martin Luther King's dream, and with their help, a bringing together of young, old, male, female, white, black.. A HUGE coalition that could have endured.. I could even see Bill becoming Sec of State and Hillary , senate majority leader (lord knows Reid is not cutting it)..


And instead .... we have acrimony and pictures like this.. and almost daily "apologies"..and poor, under educated, & older white women vs almost everyone , and African Americans turning away from the man they trusted and loved for many years..and they all just look totally "tapped out".. and angry



This is how we kill dreams.. but only Clinton dreams this time...thanks to the people who can read between the lines, and who know about "the google"..and "the internets".

[FrenchieCat]

1. I know how you feel!

:(

[K Gardner]

2. I've pined about this all day.. must be something in the air. The absolute

overwhelming wave that gripped this nation in the person of Barack Obama has not ebbed, but it has been held back.. stymied by the sheer wall of arrogance, dissonance and division built and still being constructed by the Clintons. I think once THEY are gone, we will see the wave wash over this nation in a tidal surge, as it should have after Iowa, or NH, or SC, or Feb 11.. or any date since then.

It is a shame we have had to wait. But I think it will come, still, and we will go forward united to change this country, this world.

It will not be what it could have been with the Clintons, but that is the path of divergence THEY chose. Excellent post !