Hillary Hatred

I confess to not getting it. My spouse works for Hillary, so that might explain some of it. But while I know many people hate Hillary passionately, I confess that what drives the anger eludes me. I've got friends on the left who are apoplectic about her and ones on the right who are equally livid. Stanley Fish takes a crack at explaining the phenomenon today.

And on Friday night, Bill Maher had an interesting line saying that if you hate Hillary it says more about you than her. (He's for Obama, by the way.) The Hillary hatred of the right is easier to understand, I think. It's had longer to incubate and it's been nursed by all kinds of marital and sexual fantasies: She had an affair with Vince Foster. She's gay. The marriage is an arrangement. Etc. Etc. God knows, the Clintons have given everyone enough to talk about but overall the right-wing hatred seems easier to fathom. The left hatred--she's an appeasing, triangulating, Lieberman-in-drag, warmongering, prevaricator--is a newer phenomenon and harder to discern. Yes, she's waffled in Iraq but her piorouettes seem modest compared to the transformation of DLCer John Edwards into a populist and that doesn't seem to get under the left's skin. I watched Michelle Obama on Good Morning America today basically seethe and not answer whether she could back Hillary for President. I can't explain Hillary hatred but it's out there. I suspect rage is a free-floating quality and the right will come down on Obama if he's the nominee just as hard just as many on the left are convinced that Bush knew there were no weapons of mass destruction but chose to go to war to help Halliburton. I wrote the first newsweekly cover story on Hillary, a March 1992 story for U.S. News about whether she helped or hurt Bill Clinton, a question that's been asked so many times since, it's absurd. But what's amazing to me, 16 years after he introduction on the national stage, is how she still stirs such emotion. It's something I write about a lot, but I confess don't really understand at a gut level.

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