Hillary Is In It to Win It

And I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country -- about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures." -- Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, last week

I'm pleased to be able to share this National Conversation, because that is what this election ought to be: not a shouting match, but a conversation with the American people about our ideas, our values, and our plan for a stronger America." -- Presidential candidate John Kerry, remarks to Democratic Leadership Council, May 7, 2004

I first heard John Kerry float his "national conversation" schtick in Dover, New Hampshire, sometime in November of 2003. I remember it clearly because while I usually used Kerry speeches as opportunities to catch up on lost sleep, this one had me awake from the start because it was so bizarre. After months of looking like a stiff disinterested creep, Kerry suddenly came bounding out onstage, goofily caressing the mic like Phil Donahue, imploring the audience that "I really want to have a conversation with you." He said it in a crazed tone that suggested the sentence was unfinished, that maybe the second part originally read, "...and then eat your liver."

He followed the "conversation" line up by asking the audience to "look into my eyes and into my guts" to see if he was just the same old typical Democrat, or if he was something different and perhaps better. Newspapers subsequently changed the "guts" line to "gut" in quotes.

That was John Kerry in a nutshell. He decided to take the big step of inviting his audience to examine him as a person and search out the glistening originality of his character not two seconds after trotting out a "let's have a conversation" line that was not only a hideously-worn old saw of Democratic campaign speechery, but was also a bald concoction of the party's corporate PR slaves at the Democratic Leadership Council, which had been hosting a "National Conversation" annual conference since 1997. The DLC's "national conversation" was actually a series of strategic meetings and plenary sessions between the group's member elected officials and its more prominent (i.e. monied corporate) members; the council's idea of a "national conversation" was probably Bruce Reed and Evan Bayh hitting the links with a pair of Union Carbide executives.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton announced her run for president last week. Now, she was hitting the "National Conversation" line four sentences into her first speech as a national presidential candidate. You have to wonder what it says about a political candidate when she runs out of her own ideas less than fifty words into her national sojourn.

Actually, it took less time than that; the very first lines of her speech ("I'm in. And I'm in to win.") were a cheap ripoff of Disney teenie idol Corbin Bleu's "Push it to the limit" lyrics. Think about that; in preparation for what was clearly the biggest and most important speech of her life to date, Hillary Clinton sat down, plucked the inspirational top from a crappy teenie boy-band song, and then plunged right into a student-body-right regurgitation of DLC focus-group campaign gobbledygook, rhetoric that was still bruised and squashed quite flat from the pounding it took on the Kerry campaign trail two years ago. This was her way of introducing the future President Clinton's "new ideas" to the world.

It's somewhat unfair to bash a politician for literary unoriginality these days, mainly because the vast majority of them are guilty of using the same robotic, machine-generated, market-tested campaign rhetoric. But Hillary's opening speech was really remarkable for its computerized coldness even compared to such notorious campaign robots as John Kerry and Wes Clark. It was a surprisingly impersonal, almost defiantly by-the-book recitation of the DLC formula for national Democratic campaigns - bash the incumbent, talk tough militarily, and then try to beat the Republicans in the middle on the issues of health care, the environment, and a balanced budget. Take a look at the opening of Hillary's speech:

I'm in. And I'm in to win.

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