Desperate White House Wife

It's become clear over the last week that the more Hillary Clinton becomes desperate, the more she reveals her true republican self.

The fact that this self is unscrupulous is bad enough, but the fact that her whole campaign for the last year has been predicated on positioning, spin, and other varieties of public relations is worse.

In fact, it is not only worse, it is Bushian, and that is the worst.

Even though Clinton won two and a half contests of the four staged on Tuesday, her campaign strategists are fighting among themselves, her campaign is in a turmoil, and, it seems, they can't decide which tack to take. Should they try the lying (about NAFTA, about Obama's religion)? Should they try the cheating (trying to seat delegates from the Florida and Michigan primaries)? Should they try the fear-mongering (the red telephone ad)? Should they try the sucking up to Republicans (spelling out similarities between Clinton and cheerleader-for-war McCain)?

No one ever said that the Clintons weren't corrupt. Even they didn't say that. The only questions were:

1) Were they less corrupt than the Republicans and

2) Did they combine at least a modicum of compassion and interest in the public good with their corruption?

Back in the 90s, I felt that, on balance, Bill Clinton was openly compassionate, and that his corruption did not fatally taint his administration. But Hillary Clinton seems to have learned the wrong lesson from her Senatorial success.

The lesson she has learned is that Republicans such as McCain are more her friends than Senators with progressive principles.

As a result, it now appears that Clinton and McCain stand together on one side of a divide, and Barack Obama stands on the other side of that divide. The divide is between the inside-the-beltway ruling class, who can see no reason of any kind that they should give up the power they have accumulated and the avenue to wealth that it represents, and the citizenry of the country, who in every poll insist that the country is headed in the wrong direction. In the last week, Clinton has put herself on McCain's ticket, attacking the change that Obama promises and seems poised to deliver, and promising more more more of the same of what we have had for the last thirty years.

More of the same is exactly what almost everyone does not want, but Clinton tells us everyday in every way that that is exactly what we will get -- what we have had is what she touts as her "experience".

What we see in her campaign is that we will get the same old same old with an added measure of chaos.