That Goldwater Girl

Tuesday. May 24, 2016.

President of the College Government Hillary Rodham, Wellesley College Class of 1969, speaking at her commencement ceremony, May 31, 1969. No mention in the news of the day if she was too shouty.  Photo courtesy Wellesley College.

Bernie Bitter-enders online are going down with the ship with their I HATE HILLARY flags nailed to the mast. That’s the way it’s been with many of them, the Bernie Boys at Salon and other outlets like Huffington Post, Jacobin, and the Intercept. It hasn’t been enough for them to champion Bernie. They’ve had to vilify, loathe, and despise Hillary, as if her being evil was integral to their support for Bernie. Often they’ve ranted in posts, op-eds, and tweets as if there was nothing else to their support for Bernie except their hatred for Hillary.

Keeping in mind that the people you meet in your Twitter and Facebook timelines are representative only of themselves---and yourself. You put them there, after all.---it’s sometimes seemed I’ve had more positive things to say about Bernie than some of his most passionate supporters. Lately it’s begun to seem that I have more positive things to say about Bernie than Bernie himself who seems to be in danger of being as consumed with Hillary hate as the Bitter-enders.

Some of them show signs of calming down and coming around. I expect most of them will sooner or later. They’ll start making the case that at least she’s not as awful as Trump and in the process discover there are things about her that aren’t as awful as they thought.

Howie Klein of DownWithTyranny is one of the last of us old-school independent bloggers, someone whose work I’ve liked and admired a longtime running. He’s for Bernie. Boy, is he for Bernie! And he’s bitter these days. He isn’t the bitterest of Bitter-enders. In fact, I’m not sure he counts as a Bitter-ender. But he is bitter about what he believes is the complete corruption of the Democratic Party establishment and bitter about Hillary’s not measuring up to his idea of what a good and true liberal Democrat ought to be. In fact, he doesn’t believe she’s a liberal at all or even a Democrat.

As far as he’s concerned, she is what she’s been since she was 16 years old, a Goldwater Republican.

Yes. That again.

Goldwater Girl.

I can’t get over that one.

People keep bringing it up as if a 67 year old former United States Senator and Secretary of State and likely next President of the United States is still exactly what she was when she was a 16 year old high school student, as if all of us, no matter how far we’ve progressed in life, are still and always only who and what we were back in the eleventh grade.

I can’t remember for sure the first time I heard this used against her. (In my opinion, it’s a point in her favor. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Probably back in the 90s during Bill’s presidency. Then it would have been used as a line of attack on him.

How reliable a liberal or even a Democrat could he be, the thinking---if you could call it thinking---would have gone, if his wife and by his own account his most trusted confidant and advisor, the person he charged with designing and seeing to passage his health care plan was a closet Republican, and a Goldwater Republican at that?

Like I said, I can’t remember if I heard it back then. I definitely remember it coming up in ‘08, brought up by Obama supporters, this time in support of the case that he was the more liberal of the two, if not in fact the only true liberal. Somewhere inside her the spirit of that young Goldwater Republican was still alive and manifesting herself in Hillary’s every current act and thought. The proof of this was that the person making the argument could interpret everything she did and said as showing the Goldwater Girl’s influence. No bias, partisanship, cherry-picking, special pleading, or strawman---or rather strawgirl---building involved, of course. She is what she was, and was what she is, plain as day, and that was all there had to be to that. What more proof do you need?

It was an attempt to juvenilize her. It allowed whoever was raising the point to avoid contending with her as a full-fledged grownup.  Her politics hadn’t changed in forty-four years because she’d hadn’t changed.

Instead of her being a United States Senator with a long list of accomplishments as a politician, attorney, and advocate for women’s and children’s rights, health, and education, she was frozen back in time as a silly teenage girl whose head was still turned by a gun-toting, cowboy-hatted, square-jawed, silver-haired, Right Wing Arizonan who’d opposed Civil Rights and was willing to blow up the world in an extreme defense of liberty while innocent children picked daisies. Or something like that. At any rate, it effectively erased her entire adult career from the debate, and back then, as it now, her breadth and depth of experience compared to her opponent’s inexperience was one of her central arguments in her own favor.

So I’m not surprised that Klein and other Bernie supporters have resorted to it. After all, if you can’t actually argue away her experience and achievements, you can try to show that all she’s done has been motivated by the same politics that inspired her to put on her own cowgirl outfit and cowboy hat with the slogan AUH2O on the crown fifty-two years ago.

But Klein unwittingly undermines his own argument by taking it one step too far. A year after the 1964, Hillary was off to Wellesley College, and Klein brings up the fact that during her freshman year, she was elected president of the college chapter of the Young Republicans. Klein probably means this as proof that once a Republican, always a Republican. But he fails to note that while she was still a Republican, she wasn’t a Goldwater Republican anymore. She was a Rockefeller Republican. Remember them? Rockefeller Republicans? Big-spending, pro-Civil Rights, liberal Republicans? What Klein is pointing to his her first steps of moving to the left. By her junior year she was supporting Eugene McCarthy, the very liberal, anti-war Democratic candidate for president.

The summer of 1968 she went to Washington to work for the House Republican Conference but that was an internship---she was a political science major---to which she was assigned by her thesis advisor who appears to have done it to test her newly adopted liberalism. While in DC she was mentored by Charles Goodell, a Rockefeller Republican Congressman from upstate New York who took her and several other interns with him to the Republican National Convention to help him get Nelson Rockefeller the nomination. What she learned there while watching the GOP nominate Richard Nixon instead was that she was truly no longer a Republican of any kind.

She’d already stepped down as president of the Young Republicans.

She was, however, elected president of another student organization at Wellesley. The College Government.

Hillary Rodham was seen by her classmates and professors as a natural leader and her having been president of the Young Republicans was her first leadership role at Wellesley. This was a continuation of what she was in high school beside a Goldwater Girl, by the way, a leader among her peers and someone of whom her teachers expected great things and upon whom piled responsibilities. She finished her career at Wellesley by being elected by her class to be the first student in the college’s history to speak at commencement. She gave an impassioned speech calling upon the young women of her generation to reject the growing cynicism and apathy of the times and take the lead in working for social and political change and it earned her six minutes of sustained applause plus attention from LIFE magazine.

And of course while she was at Wellesley she was busy getting a first-rate education, much of it, as is usually the case with brilliant over-achievers, self-directed.

Klein doesn’t mention any of that. If you went just by his post, you might think she did nothing in college but be a Republican.

And he doesn’t follow her to Yale Law School where before she met Bill Clinton she met and went to work for Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund. Which saves him the trouble of having to explain why Barry Goldwater, whom she did not meet until 1996, long after he’d had own falling out with the Republican Party when he realized that the only people whose liberty the party was interested in being extreme in its defense of was that of the very rich and straight white Right Wing Christian bigots, was a more dominant influence on her life, politics, and thought than Edelman.

At any rate, to bring up the Goldwater Girl argument is to begin to tell the story of the career of a very smart, dedicated, responsible, highly competent, hardworking successful leader, advocate, and politician who has all her adult life demonstrated the ability to learn and grow and change. In short, it is the first item on the long and remarkable resume of one of the most qualified people to run for President since Thomas Jefferson.

You can argue that she’s learned too many wrong lessons. You can argue that she didn’t always grow in the right directions. You can argue that her experience includes too many mistakes and errors of judgment. You can try to argue that all the experience she points to with pride as evidence she’s the most qualified candidate currently running for president is actually evidence of the contrary---that it’s evidence she will be a bad president or at least the wrong president to take the country where it needs to go and get done the things that need to get done in and in that way she is disqualified.

What you can’t argue, with any intellectual honesty, is that none of that experience matters as much as her having once upon a time, years before she was even old enough to vote, she put on her cowgirl outfit and proudly called herself a Goldwater Girl.

But while the Goldwater Girl meme is an attempt to do just that, in fact an attempt to pretend she hasn’t  achieved anything or accomplished anything at all since she was in high school, David Brooks thinks the problem with Hillary is that she has too impressive a resume. She’s achieved too much, accomplished too much, racked up too much experience. In fact, she’s too qualified.

I’ll get to that in Part Two, a post I’m planning to call Grandpa Joe and the Honors Student. Meantime, homework for you brilliant over-achievers: you can read Brooks’ column, Why Is Clinton Disliked?, at the New York Times.

You should also read Howie Klein’s whole post, which isn’t just about perpetuating the Goldwater Girl meme, Do You Want To Be In A Party Debbie Wasserman Schultz Is The Head Of? It’s bitter, but like I said, he isn’t one of the bitterest of the Bitter-enders. In fact, he seems to be coming around, a bit grudgingly, and you should this post by him too, Noam Chomsky Puts The Kibosh On #NeverHillary/#BernieOrBust Sentiment.

For extra credit: Hillary D. Rodham's 1969 Student Commencement Speech.

Outside reading: I cribbed much of the biographical information in this post from Living History, HRC's memoir of her life up through her years as First Lady. It's available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

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Comments

[Oblio]

Great stuff, cogent and sharp and spot-on... many thanks! I just found your blog and am now hooked, but... you knew that, right? Keep it up, baby!

[Stellaaaa]

It started in the summer, they had a side by side image of Hillary and Bernie from the 60's reducing her to the "Goldwater Girl" and casting him as a famous Civil Rights Leader in the 60's because of his one March.

Elevating him to some kind of prominent Civil Rights leader in the minds of the young followers was the biggest lie. Bernie moved to Vermont in the mid 60's and never came back to Civil Rights work. This lie and distortion made me go from someone who used to like him, to in fact despising him and find him dangerous. He is a dangerous populist hell bent on his ego trip with no real capacity to do what he says, lead or function in a leadership position. The more I looked into him, the less and less I liked him and respected him.

[Lance Mannion]

Thank you very much, Obilo. And welcome to Mannionville! I'm glad you're enjoying the place so far!

Stellaaaa, I used to admire Bernie too but I never saw him as future president. As you point out, he's never demonstrated a capacity for leadership as opposed to rabble-rousing and the last couple of months that has really shown. HRC, however...

[Chris the cop]

Hilary is not ethically fit to be president. Bernie is but would do more damage to the country. Life is strange.

[Ursula L]

More qualified than Jefferson. Clinton never owned slaves, and does not have the attendant crimes - human trafficking, kidnapping, torture, rape, wage theft, etc.

Jefferson's history of labor relations, unfortunately, make Trump look almost decent.