I’ve sometimes thought that there were two different versions of Hillary Clinton (and Bill Clinton, for that matter). There’s the kind most of us on the left see — dedicated public servants, flawed as all of us are, but generally decent people trying to make the world better.
And then there’s the version that some in certain segments of the media see — I’ll call it the “Clintons”. According to the right-wing media, the “Clintons” are not only just evil professionally (through corruption, crookedness, and even uglier things), they are nasty people: ambitious, power-hungry, and vindictive. Especially the last. I can’t say how many headlines I’ve seen over the years telling us just how long the “Clintons” hold grudges.
While these headlines, like other anti-Clinton narratives, are mostly found in the right-wing media, many of the sentiments have made their way into the “mainstream” media. It is an article of faith among certain journalists that the “Clintons” are nasty people obsessed with revenge. If this were the case, one would expect them to want revenge on the people who helped defeat Hillary in the 2008 primary. Presumably they’d be particularly angry at early endorsers of Obama — people who helped validate Obama’s campaign and get it off the ground.
But there’s a little problem with this narrative: Clinton just made one of those early endorsers of Obama her vice-presidential nominee. Tim Kaine decided to publicly back Obama’s campaign in February 2007. Not February 2008 — February 2007. He was one of the first prominent elected officials to throw his support to Barack Obama. And it absolutely helped Obama in Virginia, which he won by a landslide margin of 64-36. The Virginia primary was part of the stretch of wins Obama ran off in February that ultimately proved decisive in the election. In such a tight race, one could argue that Kaine’s support was responsible for a significant part of the difference.
Rather than hold a grudge against the people who helped defeat her bid for the presidency in 2008, Hillary has welcomed them with open arms. And her treatment of Kaine has not been grudging in the slightest — she has welcomed him and is by all accounts extraordinarily comfortable with him as her running mate. In the process, she has conclusively demonstrated the shallowness of the media narrative about her personal vindictiveness. Perhaps it’s too much to ask, but… maybe the media will realize that the other personal smears might, just might, not have any basis in fact either?