>Are the Republican's jealous that Clinton has carried forward the corporate
>agenda with more skill than they could?
Yes. I think the best explanation of their anti-Clinton mania is that he co-opted their issues, leaving them little of substance to talk about except their hatred of Clinton for his alleged embodiment of the "sixties." As Maureen Dowd wrote in today's New York Times: "Tom DeLay, the jagged-edge exterminator who may next-up in the Speaker roundelay, was choked up, praising the greatness of Mr. Livingston for understanding that this was 'a debate about relativism versus absolute truth.'" I think all these hyper-vulgar Marxist attempts to see tobacco capital at the root of the impeachment melodrama is embarrassingly wrong. These cretins are serious, and about 20-30% of the U.S. electorate stands behind them passionately.
But about 60% or more of the U.S. electorate finds the cretins repellent, and their attacks on Clinton may paradoxically have had the effect of boosting his support. I thought of this as I was reading Zizek's Sublime Object of Ideology last night. This passage on political identification is pretty damned profound, in my ever-humble opinion:
<quote> Our predominant, spontaneous idea of identification is that of imitating models, ideals, image-makers: it is noted (usually from the condescending 'mature' perspective) how young people identify with popular heroes, pop singers, film stars, sportsmen.... This spontaneous notion is doubly misleading. First, the feature, the trait on the basis of which we identify with someone, is usually hidden - it is by no means necessarily a glamorous feature.
Neglecting this paradox can lead to serious political miscalculations; let us mention only the 1986 Austrian presidential campaign, with the controversial figure of Waldheim at its centre. Starting from the assumption that Waldheim was attracting voters because of his great-statesman image, leftists put the emphasis of their campaign on proving to the public that not only is Waldheim. a man with a dubious past (probably involved in war crimes) but also a man who is not prepared to confront his past, a man who evades crucial questions concerning it - in short, a man whose basic feature is a refusal to 'work through' the traumatic past. What they overlooked was that it was precisely this feature with which the majority of centrist voters identified. Post-war Austria is a country whose very existence is based on a refusal to 'work through' its traumatic Nazi past - proving that Waldheim was evading confrontation with his past emphasized the exact trait-of-identification of the majority of voters.
The theoretical lesson to be learned from this is that the trait-of-identification can also be a certain failure, weakness, guilt of the other, so that by pointing out the failure we can unwittingly reinforce the identification. Rightist ideology in particular is very adroit at offering, people weakness or guilt as an identifying trait: we find traces of this even with Hitler. In his public appearances, people specifically identified themselves with what were hysterical outbursts of impotent rage that is, they 'recognized' themselves in this hysterical acting out. </quote>
Extrapolating to Clinton, I think the American masses like his evasiveness, his feel-goodism, even his cynical ability to bomb Iraqis from afar. How nice it would be to launch 450 cruises against your personal enemies and not have to worry about getting shot back at!
Doug