Seeing Through The Clintons

He is still far too indulgent of the ghastly pair, but, better late than never, Niall Stanage writes:

I remember the moment when the last vestiges of the admiration I had once felt for Bill and Hillary Clinton vanished.

By May 2008, Barack Obama had opened up an all-but-insurmountable lead over Hillary in the contest for the Democratic party's presidential nomination. The former first lady was asked why, therefore, she was prolonging the battle, risking significant damage to the party in the process.

"We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," she replied.

To raise the spectre of political murder in any campaign would have been startling. To do so against Obama – whose status as the first serious African-American candidate for the White House had obliged him to have secret service protection from a conspicuously early stage – was disgusting.

Hillary's comment was even more incendiary because it came towards the end of a campaign in which the family that had dominated Democratic politics for most of the previous two decades had shown little reluctance to play the race card.

Bill had been somewhat slyer and more oblique than his wife. The morning of the South Carolina Democratic primary, four months before his wife's appalling remark, he made an unprompted comparison of Obama to Jesse Jackson.

"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in '84 and '88, and he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama's run a good campaign here," he said.

To people outside the US, unfamiliar with the coded language that has sprung up around racial issues in America, the remark seemed innocuous. But the audience that mattered heard the "dog whistle" perfectly clearly. An Obama victory in South Carolina would be meaningless, Clinton was saying, since it was the first state in the primary process with a significant African-American population, Obama was The Black Candidate and … well, those black folks, you know what they're like.

"I was offended by it," Hermene Hartman, a Chicago publisher and acquaintance of Obama's, told me months later. "It was a dismissal of the people who voted for Barack. It was: 'If you don't vote for her, you don't count.'"

At the start of the decade – and for its first half, at least – I held the generally positive view of the Clintons that was common among liberals. After all, Bill had twice won the White House for Democrats after a protracted period of Republican dominance, and had presided over eight mostly peaceful and prosperous years. His input into the peace process in my native Northern Ireland had been vital. His wife had less charm than he possessed, but went some distance towards making up for it with a formidable intellect and an ability to withstand heavy verbal fire from opponents.

This last point was important. During Bill Clinton's presidency, it was easy for any left-of-centre observer to rally to the first couple because their attackers seemed so loathsome. With their tormentors including the creepily prurient Kenneth Starr, the egotistical Newt Gingrich and the shadowy Richard Mellon Scaife, it was credible to believe that the Clintons were indeed victims of what Hillary famously termed a "vast rightwing conspiracy".

It is not to my credit that it took until 2008, and the battle with Obama, for me to realise that although the politics and personalities of some of the Clintons' foes may have been odious, their assessment of the couple's uncommon ruthlessness was on-the-button. Politics is no garden party but, even in the early months of the contest with Obama, whispered stories of attempts to keep party colleagues in the Clinton camp through threats and bare-faced intimidation were commonplace. The stuff that went on out in the open was no less distasteful.

Bill Clinton was happy to give a nod-and-a-wink to the extremist wingnuts who alleged Obama was, in some ill-defined but dangerous way, "un-American". Among the reasons he favoured a Hillary-John McCain general election match-up, he told one audience, was that "I think it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country."

What were those of us who had defended the Clintons in the past to make of Hillary's comment that Obama had difficulty obtaining support from "hardworking Americans, white Americans", as if those two categories were one and the same?

Then there was the mendacity. Bill's fondness for lying had been well-established in relation to Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers. Hillary's inventions seemed, if anything, weirder and more baffling; none was more so than her dramatic – and fictitious – account of landing under sniper fire in Bosnia in the mid-1990s.

Now, with Hillary as secretary of state in the Obama administration and Bill trying to reclaim his "elder statesman" lustre, the bitterness of the primaries can seem a long time ago. But count me out when it comes to forgiving and forgetting.