Hillary Clinton in Hampton, NH. Marc Nozell/Flickr. Some rights reserved.The French novelist Madame de Staël is said to have remarked, of meeting Napoleon, “Ce n’est point un homme, c’est un système”: “he is not a man, but a system”. This offers a useful template for understanding the contemporary centre-left career politician, whose persona is determined less by recognisably human qualities than by cold, technocratic prowess. Recall the sociopathic adroitness of Tony Blair: after some ten years in charge of the UK, no-one was any the wiser about what he stood for, or who he was. To the extent that he represented anything at all, he represented Tony Blair. Under his leadership the Labour Party fetishised power for its own sake, a strategy which won three general elections but has proved disastrous for its prospects in the longer term. Any retrospective of that era would struggle to disentangle Blair from New Labour, and New Labour in turn from the exigencies of the neoliberal consensus of the 1990s.
A similar dilemma is at hand in any critical examination of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner for this year’s US presidential election. Doug Henwood, an American journalist and a contributing editor at The Nation, has written a short, punchy book challenging Clinton’s campaign narrative, particularly her self-identification as a plucky underdog, by highlighting her cosy relationship with big business and her dubious track record on policy.
My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency is neither exhaustive – the author helpfully points the reader in the direction of several more detailed studies – nor, in its pamphlet-style, conversational tone, especially polished. But it makes a simple, important point very effectively: that there is, and always has been, a distinctive whiff of cronyism and dishonesty about the way Hillary Clinton does politics. In one characteristic passage, Henwood draws our attention to a Wall Street Journal article that revealed how some 60 major corporations – including GE, Exxon Mobil, Microsoft and Boeing – which lobbied the State Department during her time as secretary of state, also happened to donate a total of $26 million to the Clinton Foundation in this time. And 44 of those 60 corporations participated in projects coordinated by the affiliated Clinton Global Initiative, a contentious programme which arranged for the US diplomatic corps to work in tandem with big corporations to further American economic interests abroad.
