The Working Families Party Sucks Up to Hillary

That so?

Funny, then, the enthusiasm his party evinced for Hillary Clinton, last Thursday in the midtown drear of the Sheraton New York, deep in its ballroom bowels?the carpets as mud-toned as the light as the crowd weathers the weird time frame of a political event, packed in here far from the sun. Endless waiting?and then, with ruthless precision, right on the dime, there she is. I looked up from my notebook and emitted an audible groan. The termagant herself, her fat ankles jammed into the usual black pumps; blue-suited, fat-assed, toddling around the podium looking ghastly as she tried to smile, spreading her particular variety of poison unto this apparently easily gulled rabble that's going nuts for her all around me. Thunderous cheering; the stale scent of bodies sweating under winter wool; a miasma of halitosis that gathers near the ceiling in this scumbag ballroom.

The WFP's heroine for this Senate race had arrived: this provincial duchess, this pursed-lip queen of the Des Moines Temperance Union ca. 1912, a bonneted nightmare out of the pig-slop streets of Sinclair Lewis?an actual real-life Midwestern Methodist of the sort that Mencken used as a metaphor for sleazy, small-time, chump-change Middle American corruption. Around me the bright, trusting, multicolored faces shine, for some reason, in the light of her queasy celebrity.

Mencken remarked that any true democrat?anybody who really felt any affection for humanity?would paradoxically grow to despise democracy, given that system's genius for producing hustlers to swindle and mislead the populace. He should have told that to the Working Families Party. They might even have listened.

Let's take a look at the WFP. A grassroots coalition of working-class people and organizations? That's what they say they are, and inasmuch as they're right about that, good for them. But what you see if you're attending one of their events is?in addition to the usual urban-politics preterite (the short guys with their pants too long, the women in dashikis, the high school kids working their first campaign and so wearing inappropriate suits for the occasion)?a rasher of faces to which cling the aspect of the past.

There's poor David Dinkins, for example, that Tammany highbinder, up on the podium wearing a nice suit. There's Sal Albanese, a good man who should have been the Democrats' mayoral candidate back in 1997, but whom, no less than it has Dinkins, the world's rendered sort of invisible.

There's Ruth Messinger, standing out in the tight-packed crowd, waving in response to a call-out from Bertha Lewis, the enthusiastic ACORN representative who's MC for this Hillary campaign event. In other words, the event's defining personalities?besides Hillary, if it's appropriate to call that sickly bundle of violence and ambition a "personality"?are the bulwarks of the old Democratic Party establishment.

So: a bunch of increasingly irrelevant Democrat pols, disillusioned by their Giuliani-era marginalization and by the rightward drift of the contemporary Democratic Party under President Clinton, have, in the interests of redeeming themselves, thrown themselves behind...well, of course. President Clinton's wife. Who else?

Why? Because she can win? The cynicism, contrary to the party representative's assertion, is remarkable.

Here's some of the stuff that Robert Master, the party's cochair, proclaimed while introducing Clinton, who sat right next to Carl McCall (funny how seeing McCall in the same room as Messinger can make the former seem like someone with a grand future ahead of him in New York state politics) with her usual perfect posture of regal emptiness: lips pursed, cheeks flushed in perturbation?it's always something, isn't it??nostrils flared and eyes bugging.

Master: "Hillary Clinton has shown a clear commitment to finding innovative and effective solutions to critical social ills!"

Hillary Clinton?colluder in her husband's vicious program of welfare reform, enthusiastic supporter of the death penalty, shill for the corporations?snuffled her nostrils in response.

Master: "She has stood against the 'winner-take-all' society that seemed to have developed over these last decades."

Hillary Clinton?stock-cheat, corporate lawyer, dirty fundraiser, access-peddler and the woman who, with her husband, has presided over a decade of aggressive consumerism, military adventurism and imperialism that's made the demonized 80s look good?peered with mean blue eyes at the shit-brown ceiling.

Are these people stupid? Not Dinkins or Messinger, that is, but the folks on the floor? I think they must be. Dinkins and Messinger are going to get something tangible out of a Hillary senatorship: access, cash, whatever. But this elderly black guy standing over here, yelling at Hillary to testify, pumping an occasional fist, this retired Transit man, or whatever he is?what's he going to get? Nothing. He'll see his poorer neighbors out in Ft. Greene or Brownsville chucked off the dole during the next round of welfare reform, which will probably be sponsored?it wouldn't surprise anyone but the people in this room?by Sen. Clinton. He'll see, God forbid, his grandson sent upstate for the crime of getting caught with weed in his car, under the auspices of the War-On-Drugs laws supported by the authoritarian crumb for whom he'd been suckered into voting. The boy gets caught with enough heroin in his car, Sen. Clinton might endorse his execution.

What can one say about Hillary's speech?

"Tell 'em Hillary! Tell the truth!"

"Mmm-hmmm!"

Look in the daily papers for the speech's highlights. But imagine it read aloud in that Midwestern accent of hers; that voice that plumbs painful intervals Arnold Schoenberg only encountered in dreams. Clinton's voice, I imagined, modulates almost exclusively within the range of the devil's interval: C to F-sharp and back to C, a range that drives people mad. Clinton could read aloud the King James Bible and you'd still be forced to your knees.

Hers is the goggle-eyed, tight-bonnet, Bible-thumping vocal weapon of the frigid, bullying wife of a Coal City Rotarian panjandrum. "When aaayyye pushed ferrr..." she brays, and the hard emptiness of those sounds makes your skin crawl. The way she says "society," too?and she says it a lot, she's running for office?is remarkable. The second syllable is elongated, but elongated without music. It's hard to stand.

And her eyes are amazing. You can look through them into great Saharas of moral and ethical desolation. Whatever she's doing, whether joyful (getting off as her husband executes someone, perhaps, or victimizing a White House travel office worker) or immensely sorrowful (losing a nickel down into the upholstery of her limousine) they stay the same. They're lifeless.

And yet?as I saw?those eyes and that voice can lull and satisfy and seduce a crowd drawn in from the streets with the promise of celebrity and free beer. Incredible.

The suckers are running.