Oh, no she didn't. Unfortunately, yes she did.
Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden should switch jobs. Really. -- Sally Quinn
After two decades of smearing Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sally Quinn decides to use Hillary to further her own future. She even got to do a turn on MSNBC to pimp her latest missive, which should give a good laugh to wiser Clinton supporters. The doyenne of Washington society speaks:
[...] If Clinton is dissatisfied with her role, you would never know it. She has been loyal and supportive to the president and has maintained a good relationship with him and with others in the White House. If she is being left out of the policy making, or being sent on trips to keep her out of town, she has not shown it. She is cheerful, thoughtful, serious and diligent. There are no horror stories about her coming out of the State Department. Most notable, though, is that Bill Clinton has not been the problem that so many anticipated. He has been supportive of her and of Obama, and he has stayed out of the limelight and been discreet about his own life.
Ah yes, former Pres. Clinton isn't "the problem that so many anticipated." That anticipation would reside primarily in the Washington media establishment, as well as those people who swallowed the Jeff Gerth fantasies on Whitewater and everything that flowed from it, which lasts to this day among gullible political enthusiasts who learn just enough to be shy of the truth; people who have never Googled the Pillsbury Report, or read Gene Lyons, Joe Conason, and Ken Gormley, to name three. The storyline helped by people like Sally Quinn, David Broder, Chris Matthews, and on and on. Even Matthews changed his tune on Clinton recently after the 2010 ladies' night, giving a backhanded and rather insulting comment to Clinton at the time. It's evidently all the rage now.
But wait! It gets better, which is to say, as with all things Sally Quinn, worse"
Clinton is also young enough to be the Democratic nominee at the end of an Obama second term; she will be in her late 60s in 2016, but still younger than Ronald Reagan was when he was inaugurated in 1981 (just shy of 70) and younger than John McCain, who was 72 when he ran in 2008. Most important, were she vice president and Obama were for some reason not able to fulfill his term, she would be ready to step in.
... Another scenario is that Obama could wait and choose Hillary as his running mate for 2012 and then have her step down as secretary of state so she could start campaigning. The catch with that plan, however, is that it would make Biden a lame duck and Obama would probably have to appoint an interim secretary of state. Take it seriously.
You can almost hear Hillary fans purr.
But anyone who's followed Quinn's clawing to the bottom should know better.
This was Quinn on Clinton exactly two years ago: Retreat Hillary.
The idea of a retreat is to find acceptance of yourself, to acquire insight. [...] I truly believe she would come out of an experience like that a happier, more authentic and grounded person; her own person, which she has never really had the opportunity to be. Perhaps she needs to find a loving relationship. Perhaps she could go off to Africa and India and work with aids victims. Or maybe the right thing for her to do is to stay in the Senate and try to improve life for those in this country. Whatever it is, it must be something that gives her peace and fulfillment. Something she clearly has yet to attain.
"If you consider the life of Bill Clinton," she said on 60 Minutes, "whenever he leaves the White House, he's going to get on a plane, and where is he going to go?"
"What do you mean?" a baffled Mike Wallace asked.
"Well, he -- he doesn't even have a home," she sniffed. "I mean, when you think about it, he's homeless. I mean, they've lived in sort of government properties all their lives."
But it began much earlier with Quinn, specifically, the moment William Jefferson Clinton came into Washington, which had Quinn and her media establishment buddies trained on the Clintons long before Lewinsky, though it was Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky that allowed her to really let him have it, gathering quotes from the Washington elite, including Chris Matthews, though not the late Tim Russert, because he had to appear to be unbiased, saving his invectives for "Meet the Press." And even though, as the story goes, Quinn got miffed at Hillary for dissing her over a First Lady welcome luncheon, Sally Quinn became suspicious of President-elect Clinton the moment he opened his mouth. You see, to Sally, anyone suggesting that we the people were more important than Sally's Set was obviously evil. This is from a Quinn classic in 1998, at the height of impeachment:
"This beautiful capital," President Clinton said in his first inaugural address, "is often a place of intrigue and calculation. Powerful people maneuver for position and worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way." With that, the new president sent a clear challenge to an already suspicious Washington Establishment.
[...] "This is a contractual city," says Chris Matthews, who once was a top aide to the late Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill. "There are no factories here. What we make are deals. It's a city based on bonds made and kept." The president, he went on, "has broken and shattered contracts publicly and shamefully. He violates the trust at the highest level of politics. Matthews, now a Washington columnist for the San Francisco Examiner and host of CNBC's "Hardball," also says, "There has to be a functional trust by reporters of the person they're covering. Clinton lies knowing that you know he's lying. It's brutal and it subjugates the person who's being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to." ...
[...] Similarly, independent counsel Ken Starr is not seen by many Washington insiders as an out-of-control prudish crusader. Starr is a Washington insider, too. He has lived and worked here for years. He had a reputation as a fair and honest judge. He has many friends in both parties. Their wives are friendly with one another and their children go to the same schools. He is seen as someone who is operating under a legal statute, with a mandate from the attorney general and a three-judge panel, although there are some lawyers here who have questioned some of Starr's most aggressive tactics. [...]
That's right, Sally Quinn completely forgot about (never knew???) Justice Rehnquist yanking Robert Fiske and replacing him with Kenneth Starr, who had sided with Paula Jones in her lawsuit against Pres. Clinton. Rehnquist appointed Judge Sentelle to the three-judge panel who appointed Starr. Sentelle coming out of the Jesse Helms North Carolina Republican machine and the judge who reversed Oliver North and John Poindexter's Iran-Contra conviction. Oh, but Starr wasn't political. It's laugh out loud ludicrous.
So, after a career of vilifying Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, including when the right was trying to hound him out of office, Mrs. Quinn now rattles off a column that defies everything she's said about Mrs. Clinton, with the objective so obvious, and which the Washington Post helped her accomplish. It's got to be a relief for old Sally. After being relegated to the "On Faith" bowels of the Post, where Jon Meacham also resides, brought on by her weirdly self-indulgent social catastrophe of double booking family weddings, Quinn was looking for a way out and Hillary's poll numbers and the Post's leniency, helped no doubt by Ben Bradlee's history at the paper and with Bob Woodward, provided it.
Trust me, if Sally Quinn is oozing anything positive about Hillary, let alone praise and pitching her for the Executive Branch and the president in 2016, it's all about Sally.
Think black widow to the fly.
Taylor Marsh is a political analyst out of Washington, D.C.