Camille on Hillary: A Busted Flush or Lucrezia Borgia?

Camille Paglia blames the Clintons as she accurately notes the fight to the finish ethos of their constituencies:

I'm puzzled by the optimism of so many commentators and Democratic functionaries who are prophesying Hillary's graceful withdrawal by mid-June. Is there anything in the Clintons' tawdry history to support such a thesis? Why wouldn't they play smiley-face rope-a-dope now and smash-mouth alley-and-ambush fisticuffs right to the bitter end -- meaning the convention in August? It's now or never for Ms. Hill. Even if Obama loses this fall, there's no guarantee whatever that she would win the Democratic nomination in 2012. That hoss will have been around the rodeo way too many times. The infusion of fresh new blood into the party -- especially women governors -- has already started. Who will want to resurrect all those 1990s mummies?

But of course, Camille forgets that Teddy the Fat went all the way to the Dem Convention in 1980 in a hopeless uphill fight against the worst sitting-president of the twentieth century. Teddy was 700 delegates behind and STILL took the fight to the floor.

Camille also forgets that Hillary's constituency, which Obama derides as "bitter & clinging to guns & religion" regards her stand-up feisty stance as exactly what to do when surrounded by the elitist Academentia/Hollyweird/MSM that they also despise. Why should Hillary back down and lose her trademark gutsy spunk? She's not ruining her brand, but reinforcing it with the Dems who may just nominate her in '12.

But Camille does have a point in that Hillary herself has back pages worthy of a Catherine d'Medici re Vince Foster's strange suicide & her rapid cover-up of his personal papers, even forcing the Secret Service out of his office after his body was found along the GW Parkway:

my interest was piqued last year by claims that Foster was shattered by the role he had played three months earlier in the outrageous order for federal agents to attack David Koresh's ranch at Waco, Texas, producing a conflagration that led to 76 deaths, including 21 children. Why has the Waco fiasco been forgotten? It triggered the worst case of domestic terrorism in U.S. history, the 1995 revenge bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

The slaughter of a religious cult may have unhinged the relatively idealistic Vince Foster, but to Hillary and Janet Reno [remember Kimba Wood, Bill's first choice for AG, the playboy bunny who didn't pass Hillary's muster?], the Koresh slaughter & Foster suicide were just water under the bridge and over the Niagara of their backstairs plotting & scheming.

Thankfully, their ham-handed handling of Elian Gonzales so angered Florida voters that Al Gore honestly lost that state in '00. Even GWB has been a better president than the unctious buffoon Gore-bot would have made. But I digress.

Female governors to the contrary notwithstanding, there are few female contenders down the road who might aspire to the presidency. In the meantime, the Dems might bribe Hillary with Harry Reid's job in the Senate. She couldn't do worse than Harry, who has been a total wash-out.