Bill and Hillary's Championship Wrestling
The spat between Bill and Hillary Clinton over Bill's offer to pardon 16
members of the FALN is staged-no more plausible than one of those all-star
wrestling matches with fake blood and fake grimaces. Ms. Clinton will be happy
to use the power of the executive branch to help her bid for the Senate in New
York at every opportunity. But as this episode shows, the New York road show
will have at least three elements. First, she will recommend from time to time
that the Federales reopen investigations, or look into this or that
problem-just to remind voters that she draws legitimacy from the White House.
(She did this recently in the case of the young Yeshiva student who was shot to
death on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994.) Second, she will disagree with the
administration now and then to show that she is independent of Bill and
nobody's person but her own. Third, the candidate will tack left, then right in
an attempt to gather votes from both downstate liberals and upstate
conservatives-and will have it both ways, pandering to minorities one day and
distancing herself the next. This is vintage "New Democrat" stuff, pioneered by
Bill himself. The message to Latino voters and politicians, by the way, is:
"Take it or leave it. Its the New Democrats or the Republicans; take your
choice.''
The FALN stories are not well reported and have not yet given us the nitty
gritty. To make a judgment about whether the 16 deserve to be pardoned-or just
locked up forever-we need to know who did what to whom and whether the
sentences were fair or ridiculously heavy. (Juan Gonzalez in this morning's
New York Daily News suggests that those being considered in the clemency
bonanza were convicted not of bombings but of "lesser offenses.") In the
absence of the nitty gritty, however, I will take a flier and say that the
administration did this for political gain-i.e., to help Ms. Clinton in New
York, home of a great many Latino voters. If this had been a serious, closely
reasoned plan, the White House would have some point person out there, making
the case to the public. The off-handed nature of the thing suggests that what
you suspect is true, Ms. Jacoby.
This opens onto a broader political question of how the two parties can
appeal to minority voters without constantly insulting their intellects. My own
hunch is that both middle-class blacks and middle-class Latinos are pure
Republican timber, waiting to be claimed, if only the GOP can get into gear and
mount a campaign less insulting that what the Democrats dish up. A penny for
your thoughts here.
