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Academic

: Essentially Contested America

Hillary's "Playing to 15"

By Robert Justin Lipkin

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On 13 January 2007, ECA published a post "Playing to 15." The point of that post was to show that as a young man George W. Bush could not accept defeat. Whenever he would be on the verge of losing a game, he would change the rules or alter what counts as victory. Here is Maureen Dowd's restatement of this phenomenon which essentially revealed how Mr. Bush would never admit defeat and never permit the real winner to prevail.

W. always acts like he's upping the ante in a board game where you roll the dice and bet your plastic army divisions on the outcome. This doesn't surprise some of his old classmates at Yale, who remember Junior as the riskiest Risk player of them all, known for dropping by the rooms of friends, especially when they were trying to study for exams, for extended bouts of ''The Game of Global Domination.'

Junior was known as an extremely aggressive player in the venerable Parker Brothers board game, a brutal contest that requires bluster and bluffing as you invade countries, all the while betraying alliances. Notably, it's almost impossible to win Risk and conquer the world if you start the game in the Middle East, because you're surrounded by enemies.

As Graydon Carter recollects in the new Vanity Fair, Gail Sheehy wrote an article for the magazine about W. that made this point: ''Even if he loses, his friends say, he doesn't lose. He'll just change the score, or change the rules, or make his opponent play until he can beat him.''

W.'s best friend when he was a teenager in Houston, Doug Hannah, told Ms. Sheehy: ''If you were playing basketball and you were playing to 11 and he was down, you went to 15.''

Even if it was clear who was winning, W. wanted to go further to see what would happen. It was a technique that worked well in Tallahassee in 2000, but not so well in Tikrit.

What is so ironic and frightfully dangerous about Hillary is that although she pillories George Bush mercilessly, she shares his pathology of being unable to resist changing the rules of the game until she wins. She agreed to the rules of the DNC concerning hi:

its decision to strip Florida and Michigan of their "delegates" when she thought neither would be relevant to her inevitable success in becoming the Democratic Party's 2008 nominee. But now when she needs both states to defeat Senator Obama, she's changed her mind. Now, Hillary's Hammer, Harold Ickes, insists the Michigan Democratic Party's solution to apportion delegates according to what strikes many as a reasonable manner--given the flawed primary process--ignores the 600,000 Michigan Democrats who voted for Hillary. But what about the more than a million Michigan Democrats who did not vote because the DNC stripped the Party of delegates for scheduling the primary contrary to the DNC's rules? Should their reliance on the National Party be ignored? Should their votes be ignored because they followed the rules? What message does Clintonism send to our children and fellow citizens? Keep your bargains unless doing so is not in your interests. All the parsing of rules, all the prevarication, all the self-deception can't put an honest Hillary back together again.

The DNC's decision to strip Florida and Michigan of their delegates is not the cause of Hillary's defeat. A letter in Yesterday's NY Times, by Paula Perrone, explains Hillary's defeat. According to Perrone, Hillary's "flawed candidacy has hit a wall, not a glass ceiling. And the wall that it has hit is entirely of her own construct. If we want to teach our daughters about how to lead, hers is not the playbook. For her public life is a study in compromises, contradictions and shortcuts, all of which are undermining her candidacy." Continue reading here.

So when Hillary thought she would easily win in Iowa and then on super-Tuesday, her standard was that a majority of the pledged delegates should determine the victor. When hope that she would meet that standard faded she switched the standard. Like George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton simply decided to change the rules and "play to 15." This is precisely the sort of unprincipled conduct, we must eleminate from American politics. Rules cannot, should not, be changed in mid-course. To insist that they should, when doing so advantages you and disadvantages your opponent, makes short shrift of principle, integrity, and the character we so desperately need in the Oval office.

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Full post as published by Essentially Contested America on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).