roachboy

my problem with bill clinton's administration had nothing to do with the political "scandals" created by the right, but more to do with a possible explanation for the creation of these "scandals"--the triangulation approach to politics--which was a tactic entirely about inter-party balance of power and not at all about the relation of the clinton administration to the rank-and-file (whatever that denotes), moving ever toward the right-center, co-opting republican logic and issues, which made clinton in many respects a moderate republican president.

the main difference between his administration and that of cowboy george appeared at the transnational level in a preference for multilateral agreements as opposed to assymterical bilateral agreements, which are preferred by the bush people. personally, i think that the problem for the far right with multi=lateral agreements was that they were insufficiently tied to nationalism, which is the absolute center of conservative politics, without which there is no conservative ideology. [[so the "scandals" were about creating an illusory clinton, one who occupied fundamentally different positions than he in fact occupied, and who was therefore able to be cast as a "bad man"--and the (imaginary) politics he stood for acribed to his being a "bad man"---which is about differentiating conservative political positions from those clinton had co-opted...so i take these "scandals" as an index of the desparate position clinton's triangulation strategy put the republicans in]]

my hesitations about hillary clinton derive from this, not from the manufactured pseudo-scandals. i was never sure of how bill's administration used hillary--at times, she seemed like she was positioned to the left of bill in order to take the political hit for policy initiatives that were out of phase with the overall logic of triangulation. so i had the sense that she was all about the same kind of tactics, and haven't read or heard anything that woudl contradict that.

but i'm not sure of this---it could be just an appearance that obtained then, but which does not reflect hillary clinton's personal views or what her administration might be like.

what i am more sure of is that she, like all the other democrats who have a viable shot at the nomination--with all caveats about what generates this impression in place---is a neo-liberal. so my mind the central ideological problems that the americans face are connected, at one level or another, to the consequences of the debacle that has been neoliberalism implemented. it is because from this viewpoint there are no real alternatives being presented, only variants, that what i see as happening in the next elections is mostly the replacement of the bush people with a different set of faces.


aside: a long time ago i was waiting for the t at the harvard square stop in cambridge ma. and there was a guy who played violin and handed out this crazy mimeographed screeds that he had written when he wasn't standing in the metro busking. one of these argues that anyone whose self-image is to shot to hell that they would need the approval of a hundred million people as affirmation by running for president really shouldn't be allowed anywhere near power, simply because needing that kind of affirmation is in itself pathological.

i like that.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite