Mark West

What do the Empress Messalina, Hillary Clinton, Marie Antoinette, and George W. Bush have in common?
They all soured their nations on their dynasties.

In each case, the dynasties in question did not decline in popularity because their policies had failed. That doesn’t seem to matter much; the policies of the Emperor Claudius, the last of the Julio-Claudians, were widely regarded as fairly evenhanded, while the Clinton administration can be rightly seen as the “moi” in an “apres moi, le deluge” scenario of incompetence and mismanagement.

What makes a people hate a dynasty is hubris, which a beloved professor from my undergraduate days defined as “overweening pride.” Messalina’s flouting of tradition, Marie’s displays of wealth, and George W. Bush’s smirking arrogance in assuming that he knows so much more than do his subjects are all examples of hubris; and they all led to a day of reckoning.

For poor, simple Marie Antoinette, it was revolution and the tumbrel; for George W. Bush, it is the lowest approval ratings since such things were tabulated. For Messalina, it was the end of the proud lineage started by Julius Caesar and continued by Augustus, men of such brilliance that even today there are months which commemorate them.

Hillary Clinton has managed to take a nomination that was hers for the asking and turn it into a ruinous, slow-motion train wreck; in her inability to see what is plainly laid before her, she is plunging, headlong, toward not only the ruin of her own reputation and the legacy of her husband but almost certainly the delivery of the election to her opponents.

No clearer evidence of this can be offered than Rush Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos.”  Limbaugh is urging his listeners, those self-proclaimed Ditto-heads, to register to vote in the Pennsylvania primaries as Democrats and vote for Clinton. In so doing, he argues, the nomination for the Democrats will be handed to the weakest candidate, who John McCain will surely defeat; even if Obama should gain the nomination, Limbaugh argues, these “Operation Chaos” voters will encourage Clinton and her campaign of unpleasantries to continue, doing the swift-boating for the Republicans, while McCain stands to the side, looking presidential.

In the old days, some party boss — Lyndon Johnson, say — would have taken Hillary aside and told her that she was no longer a candidate, that her attempt to be president was at an end.

Today, the defense against her is the superdelegates. In the wake of bruising 1968 and 1980 primaries, the superdelegate system was developed under the McGovern-Fraser Commission (the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection). Their mandate was simple — to prevent a drawn-out battle from wrecking the best candidate’s chances of winning the general election. Harry Reid has said that there is a plan to end the internecine conflict; it will no doubt involve some mass defection of Clinton’s superdelegates, probably well before the Pennsylvania primary.

Perhaps this will work, and end the hemorrhaging of public support for the Democratic Party. But nothing can now salvage the reputation of the Clintons, who now look as devious and opportunistic to their one-time supporters as to the most avid Ditto-head. In her monomaniacal pursuit of an unattainable goal, her single-minded concentration on vanquishing an opponent no matter what the cost to institutions she should, by rights, defend, Hillary has come to resemble none other than George W. Bush — another stubborn person who doesn’t know when to give up.

Surely, it is time for both of them to go.
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Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.