I love when people get me thinking

I have been thinking for some time that Hillary and Bill Clinton's scorched-earth political campaign style was troubling ONLY BECAUSE THEY WERE TURNING IT ON A DEMOCRAT. Save it for the Republicans, those fuckers, they deserve it. But Ron Rosenbaum in Slate today offers some useful analysis. Like me, he was willing to accept Hillary and Bill's tendency to attack opponents in the cause of advancing Democratic party goals or commendable policies:

In the past, I've had a kind of grudging admiration for Hillary Clinton's Machiavellian side; there is such a thing as idealistic Machiavellianism, the use of complex tactical manipulation to achieve noble idealistic goals.

Rosenbaum seems to be asking the question: Has Hillary's Machiavellianism always been in the service of laudable goals, or is it simply tied to her ambition? Does Hillary fight dirty just to win?

I don't think that's fair (and I admit I may be misreading Rosenbaum's conclusion). Tied to my reflections yesterday, I'm left to wonder if Hillary's bare-knuckle style is the inevitable result of her belief that all politics is trench warfare.

If so, then allow me to propose a metaphor. The U.S. built its armed forces to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is dead and buried, even if Putin is still engaged in cloak and dagger espionage (mostly targeting his own domestic opponents and the Russian press). We are left with an impressive military force that can kick almost anybody's ass. But, as we learned in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have no idea what to do once we have pinned our opponent to the mat. We can't reach into the hidey-places where Bin Laden retreated to, and we can't make friends with Iraqis.

Maybe Hillary's approach to politics was built for a different era, one dominated by Republican supremecy, and every Democratic win--whether a congressional seat or a policy proposal--needed to be fought for using everything in our arsenal. But like the Soviet Union, the Republican party overreached, extending its strategic ambitions too far, and George Bush and Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have been responsible for the collapse of the evil empire. If that is true, shouldn't we pause to reimagine our approach to politics? Don't we need to rethink our arsenal and our strategies? And, as importantly, our leaders?