'Vast Right Wing Conspiracy' Is Back

One moment Hillary Clinton is brilliant and the next moment she brings back a cliche from the 1990s. I never liked it when she coined the phrase, 'vast right wing conspiracy.' I knew what she meant but I thought, at the time, that it made her look petty when a more thoughtful explanation would have served her better. Here's the AP story in The Guardian:

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday described past Republican political malfeasance in New Hampshire as evidence of a ``vast, right-wing conspiracy.''

Clinton's barbed comments revived a term she coined for the partisan plotting during her husband's presidential tenure and echoed remarks she made last weekend in New Hampshire, which holds the nation's first primary.

(snip)

Clinton asserted on Tuesday that the conspiracy is alive and well, and cited as proof the Election Day 2002 case of phone jamming in New Hampshire, a case in which two Republican operatives pleaded guilty to criminal charges, and a third was convicted.

Like I said, I didn't like the phrase the first time around and I don't think much of it now. For one thing, it makes it sound like someone or a small group is in charge of such a conspiracy. In reality, there have been multiple scandals in the last six years, some in the White House, some in the Senate, some among Republican fundraisers, and some in the House of Representatives. I know, I know, it seems every time we hear of one of these scandals, there's two or three characters in the scandal with a close connection to somebody like Karl Rove. But Hillary's phrase feels like one of those phrases tested on a focus group rather than worked through until its owned by the speaker.

The corruption in the Republican Party has been going on for some time now and it's gotten increasingly worse since the 1980s. One can argue that the Reagan presidency never fully addressed the issue, at least not in a way that was in the best interests of the public. The senior Bush called for more honest government and he gave pardons to members of the Reagan administration and changed any number of rules, legally, to make it easier for Republicans to pull nonsense. Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush simply threw out the rules and Kenneth Starr went off on a $70 million fishing expedition with the clear help of right wing friends in the media. But its not one vast conspiracy.

Certainly, Republicans in leadership positions have engaged in some conspiracies, Duke Cunningham and Tom DeLay being the two best examples. But there have been multiple 'conspiracies' on the part of the big players in the Republican Party, if that's how one wants to look at it. Too many Republican leaders talk about values while looking for big money and what it is they have to do to get that money. That's a party that simply has lost its moral compass. Newt Gingrich compounded the problem by actively recruiting political candidates who 'share' his values. But the overwhelming majority of Republican rank and file are generally hardworking and honest people who frankly have not been looking very critically at the leaders of their own party and sometimes don't really want to take a look. I can understand when people want to fight for their 'heroes' but there aren't too many heroes in the Republican Party these days worth fighting for.

Now Hillary Clinton isn't too far from the truth. I'll give her that, but she needs to keep it real.

Although Republicans in power have become corrupt or prefer too often to look the other way, I think we're talking, to some extent, about a generational problem. To be honest, there are sometimes similar problems in the Democratic Party, particularly when it comes to big money donors. I would prefer Hillary Clinton to explain how she herself would be listening to average Americans rather than big money. We all know that a politician at the national level needs money and that's a fact of life but the fact that Hillary Clinton is fighting with Barack Obama for big money donors is not necessarily a good sign, even if both candidates are considerably cleaner than much of the Republican leadership these days.