Who's Sorry Now?
After the events of this past weekend, it’s very difficult to hear Hillary Clinton extol the virtues of forgiveness. Indeed it’s extremely hard to hear Sen. Clinton say anything at all today over the relentless drumbeat in my own mind: “Don’t say pimp ... don’t say pimp ...”
I really need this job.
Clinton is typically fluid and charming before more than 800 students in American Politics 101, a class taught by the legendary Larry Sabato, at the University of Virginia. Batting back questions about biofuels and stem-cell research and universal health care with data and talking points, Clinton gets a solid 10 for technical merit. Still, you can’t help but wince when she gets to the parts of her remarks in which she describes people who lose their jobs. Clinton’s compassion for America’s unemployed is seemingly boundless, unless the unemployed in question have dissed her daughter.
The remarks seem to spin off into a different stratosphere in response to a student question about the “most influential person in her political career.” After paying homage to the Roosevelts, JFK, and LBJ, and with just a roundabout reference to her husband, Clinton arrives at Nelson Mandela. She describes Mandela at his inauguration, introducing three prison guards who’d treated him humanely in his many years at Robben Island. She quotes Mandela saying, “If I left prison embittered and full of hate, I would still be in prison. ... You have to give up whatever hate you have. You must learn to forgive.”
This is obviously a lesson with which Clinton still struggles. She can describe how powerfully it affected her that Mandela—in a spirit of bipartisan trust and hope—left the army and police force intact when he assumed power, while she cautions that 40 percent of Americans won't support a Democratic nominee regardless of who wins, presumably because there can be no trust or hope. She can claim to have forged deep personal friendships with individual Republicans—from Lindsey Graham to Sam Brownback—by getting beyond “caricatures” and “stereotypes.” But then she warns that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will surely be swift-boated—“subject to the full force of the Republican machine,” because “that’s what they’re good at.”
And Clinton draws a distinction between herself and Barack Obama when she says, “I have no illusions about bringing the country together in the absence of a fight.” But the implicit distinction between herself and Mandela is there, too. She wants reconciliation, and she wants to forgive, but she can’t get beyond her certainty that what needs forgiving and reconciling is an immovable wall that only she can overcome. Clinton wants to say that she, like Mandela, has not been exiled to some remote emotional prison of bitterness and hate. Yet she just saw to it that a reporter was suspended for saying mean words.
Dan Gross pointed out earlier today that the Clintons have a complicated relationship with forgiveness and redemption. Hillary Clinton wants to believe she’s forgiven what’s been done to her while warning us that she’s the only one tough enough to stand up to the next round of it. As always seems to be the case with the Clintons, the political is personal. The personal is personal, too.