Vaulting ambition

The hyper-ambitious hyperachiever Jeanine Pirro, who wants to be the Republican challenging the hyper-ambitious hyperachiever Hillary Clinton for her Senate seat next year, has been accusing Hillary of being hyper-ambitous and hyperachieving.  Hillary wants to be President!  Imagine!

A politician who is ambitious for higher office?  What is this world coming to?

The AP story about Pirro's horror at Hillary's vaulting ambition notes that this is meant only to stir up the faithful to an angry whipping out of their checkbooks.  An awful lot of the New Yorkers who made Hillary their Senator did it so that she had a better shot at becoming their President.  Voting for her in 2000 was their way of getting a head start on voting for her in 2008.  It was the first Democratic primary.

Pirro won't get very far with that line of attack, only as far as the bank, which fortunately for her isn't that far away as she'll be pushing a big wheelbarrow loaded with cash.

But just because the underlying motivation for attacking Hillary's ambition is cynical and mercenary, it doesn't mean that Pirro doesn't believe in it or that she's thinking cynical and mercenary thoughts when she says it.

Politicians routinely condemn their opponents for sins and failings and, often, crimes they are guilty of themselves.  I suspect few of these politicians are conscious of their own hypocrisy.

People feel themselves to be virtuous.  They don’t need to be good to believe they are.  They just need to sound good to themselves and to their friends and fellow hypocrites.  They are very adept at thinking good thoughts about themselves.  This is becoming a regular theme of mine.  I've used the example several times of adulterers who can, without a twinge from their consciences, sniff scornfully at other people cheating on their spouses.  These hypocrites are able to do it without a blush because they have very carefully arranged their thinking about what they are doing in bed with someone they're not married to so that the words adultery, sin, right and wrong, and possibly even sex never cross their minds.

But all kinds of sinners, cheats, frauds, hypocrites, and thieves feel morally superior to other sinners, cheats, frauds, hypocrites, and thieves simply because they've managed to talk themselves out of thinking of their own misbehaviors and crimes as what they are.  They've carefully selected vocabularies that allow them to talk past what they're actually doing and even describe it in terms that turn it into, if not virtue, then not vice.

How much more deeply did Lyndon Johnson wade into the quagmire of Vietnam because he was motivated by his vanity---"I made a promise to these people."  "I won't be the first President to lose a war."---and how much deeper did he blunder or how much longer did he stay because he was able to tell himself that he wasn't motivated by vanity.  The Nation's integrity and resolve were at stake!  It wasn't Johnson's ego that drove him.  It was his patriotism.

Republicans love to attack Democrats for being partisan.  They seem to think that this is the worst thing you can say about a politician.  And if they mean what they tell themselves they mean, that the politician is putting his or her loyalty to the Party ahead of the interests of the People, then it is a damning accusation.

Except that it always turns out that the opposite of partisan is to vote the Republican Party line.  They don’t see the hypocrisy because in their minds they aren’t arguing for the Party line.  They see themselves as arguing for all that is good and right and true.

No doubt there is a Democratic version of this hypocrisy but I can't think of it off the top of my head probably because in my mind the Democrats are allied with the angels and I've arranged the vocabulary of my thinking accordingly,

Jeanine Pirro is handed a speech in which her speechwriter has put in a line about Hillary’s Presidential ambitions.  The speechwriter didn't write it because he believes it, but because he knows it’s a surefire applause line.  He’s thinking not that Hillary’s evil because she wants to be President.  He's thinking that to Pirro’s audience there’s no greater evil imaginable than a President Hillary.

Pirro, who like every other human being on the face of the planet is convinced of her own superior virtue, reads the line over and nods in approval.  She already knows she’s a better person than Hillary.  When people disapprove of someone they generally think, “I’m nothing like that other person I don’t like,” even though it’s usually true that what we most dislike about another person is the ways they are too much like us.  Pirro, already assured in her own mind that she is nothing like Hillary, reads over the line about Hillary’s ambition and congratulates herself on being nothing like Hillary—I’m not ambitious, like her.  I don’t want to be Senator just so I can President, like her.  I’m not a lying hypocite, like her.

She steps confidentally to the podium and delivers her speech and the line designed to inspire wild applause inspires wild applause and Pirro thinks to herself, Wow!  A whole roomful of good people who agree with me!  How does she know they’re good people?  They’re like her.  They’re her type.  They agree with her.  They must be good because she’s good.  She wouldn’t like them if they weren’t good; they wouldn’t like her if they weren’t good—they’d like Hillary.

So Pirro makes sure to include this line in every speech.  And every time it gets wild applause.  Which means that every time she says it, she’s reassured that she is good, she is nothing like Hillary.

Then one day somebody from the Party comes up to her and says, Jeanine, whether you win this thing or not, we like you, we want you to know that we’ve got plans for you.

And if she wasn’t thinking it already, Pirro is seeing her run for the Senate as a stepping stone to higher office.

How does she keep the two ideas separate in her head?  That it’s wrong for Hillary to want to use the Senate as a stepping stone but not for her?

Easy.  They are separate.  What separates them is Pirro’s vanity.  All Pirro wants for herself is what she’s rightfully earned.  There’s nothing wrong with a smart, talented person wanting to put her brains and abilities to work is there?  Of course not, especially when she’d be putting them to work in service to the people of New York.  Hillary wants to be President.  Pirro wants to be Senator.  Or Governor.  Or State Attorney General.  Or an Appeals Court Judge.  Right here in New York.  She isn’t ambitious.  She’s a good public servant.

And even if she wanted to be President, well, she wouldn’t want the job for the same reason Hillary wants it.  How could she?  She and Hillary are nothing alike.

I'm writing fiction here, obviously.  I can't read Pirro's mind.  And although I'm having fun picking on a Republican, I don't mean to tie the hypocrisy I'm accusing her of practicing to her being a Republican.  I could write a similar story about Hillary, a story in which my Hillary character tells herself in all seriousness that she doesn't want to be Senator in order to become President, in which the idea that her first qualification for both the Senate and the Presidency is her last name never crosses her mind.

It would be just as much fiction as my story about Pirro.

But it would just as true.  Not necessarily true of Hillary, just as the other story isn't necessarily true of Pirro.

But true of human beings.

It's what Nero Wolfe calls the poison of conceit.
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Related:  Pirro will have to face off against Richard Nixon's son in law, Edward Cox, in the Republican primary, but she's the Party favorite and the Media coverage pretty much assumes she'll be the nominee.  Couple weeks ago, just after Pirro announced officially that she was running, Graham at The Passenger looked at the difference between how a Hillary vs. Jeanine election might play on TV and in the newspapers and how it will most likely play out in real life.   As Graham sees it, the Media will cover it as a "tough race" for Hillary and in the end it won't even be close.  Hillary wins in a walk.

Comments

[Leah A]

Fascinating.

In my mind, this post is linked to the on-going discussion of the hydra-headed hostility to Clinton and Gore.

First of all, why is it accepted dogma that wanting to be President says something weirdly awful about the person who does? The constant press juxtasposition of Gore's ambitions, (the horror of his changing wardrobe selections as tokens of his ruthless no-holds-barred pursuit of power, the derisive snickerings about his having no other life than his desire to be President, despite the clear evidence of his variety of interests and his ability to write an actual book without a ghost writer), compared to Bush's supposed more "relaxed" attitude toward becoming President, as if he had this rich life on "the ranch" to go back to if he didn't make it.

Aside from it being a total crock, why was that a superior attitude, and how on earth could the press maintain that illusion after Bush v. Gore?

2nd point: what you're doing in this post, Lance, is precisely what the press seemed incapable of doing with Clinton or Gore or Hart - to understand that such press rumminations on a candidate's character is a form of story telling that can only approach any useful truth when the storyteller manages to connect the story of any particular candidate to what makes the rest of us human.

Instead, with Clinton, "character" became a word that signified whether you had a "good" character, which seemed also to mean that you were without sin. And the Washington press corps showed themselves to be unfamiliar with any of the great novels of the Western tradition; does Emma Bovary have "character;" does Able Magwitch?

This kind of stimulation to my own thinking is what I come here for. Plus the pleasure of the actual writing.

as always, thank-you.

[Linkmeister]

Re Wolfe's line, it was captured by Kipling, too: too much ego in his cosmos.