The Physics of Hillary's Campaign

Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
January 10, 2008

A black hole, in cosmological terms, is a massive entity whose gravitational pull is so overwhelming that not even light can escape from it. A black hole, in political terms, is an information vortex so suffocatingly triangulated and so stiflingly over-analyzed that any words escaping the mouth of a candidate come off as utterly devoid of meaningful content.

When the event horizon of a political black hole is breached, defying the laws laid down by campaign advisors and consultants, it's news. And lately, Hillary Clinton and her surrogates seem to be - often without her political advisors' seeming to be aware of it, indeed, sometimes with their apparent complicity - making news precisely because they're spewing out information that really has no business escaping the black hole at the center of her campaign.

I'm thinking here particularly of the chaos that ensued when ex-Pres-husband Bill got loose on the Charley Rose Show on PBS and opined that it would be "miraculous" if Hillary managed to win Iowa. Hillary's people, backstage at the taping, are said to have been beside themselves with political angst as Bill droned on. But beyond such difficult-to-manage gaffes by the possible future First Gentleman, Hillary's info-drones have recently been dropping the ball regularly, not to say with alacrity, regarding pretty much every other significant policy utterance that has emerged from her campaign.

I'm speaking here of La Clinton's recent "Christmas" commercial and of her newly-released energy policy statement for ensuring that the United States does not remain an economic slave to the whims of Middle-Eastern oil-producing nations. Both reveal a dangerous lack of economic savvy, not to say a disturbing relaxation of the black-hole standards of her campaign.

Her widely broadcast "Christmas" campaign ad, in which she's seen doling out presents to the American citizenry, is a perfect example. First, Hillary is just terminally self-conscious, so that her every word and gesture comes off as studied and stiff, not to say false. It's really painful to watch her in this sort of situation, and why anyone with an ounce of political savvy would agree to the release of such a "commercial" defies common sense.

The message that's really being communicated here, as Hillary places several "presents" - including "Universal Health Care" and "Alternative Energy" and "Middle Class Tax Breaks" and "Bring Troops Home" - under a Christmas tree is this: "Here are your Christmas gifts, America. Oh, by the way, I put them on your credit card. Mine was maxed out. Hope you don't mind. Love, Hillary." It's just difficult to imagine that most Americans don't see through the ruse of her promising such "presents" without addressing the issue of who's going to foot the bill.

But where one of those "presents," Alternative Energy, is concerned, Hillary didn't stop with her Christmas commercial. She went on to propose that, if she's elected President, she will somehow manage to turn around the whole alternative energy situation in the United States, and to the point where her strategy for implementing new energy resources will make the Middle Eastern oil-producing nations virtually obsolete.

Indeed, Hill's "plan," which she hasn't bothered to articulate in any detail, by the way, would seem to promise that her new alternative energy initiatives will result in such a reduction in the demand for Middle Eastern oil that the price of said oil will plummet, and we'll be able to feed our fossil-fuel energy appetites at dramatically reduced rates, even as we continue to perfect new-age technologies that will further render the burning of fossil fuels obsolete.

Even, though, if she could manage to pull off such a technological miracle in the space of the next four, or even eight, years, the rest of the world, especially newly industrializing nations such as India and China, would still be ravenous for the Middle East's black gold. Economically ignorant Dem that she is, Hill fails to acknowledge that those two nations would be the real beneficiaries of an oil price reduction. But the further problem with Hillary's analysis is that, since these two emerging economic powers will very likely continue to be dependent on oil as a primary energy source for the forseeable future, the price is not likely to drop dramatically anyway, no matter how successful we are in reducing our own reliance on foreign oil.

Beyond that, you've got to ask just how Hillary plans to effect such a dramatic reduction in our nation's need for oil. Is ethanol the answer? Because if it is, then President Clinton II will be the architect of one of the most devastating economic policies the world has ever known, as the price of corn goes even higher than it has in the wake of the current ethanol stampede. If the underclass in Mexico and South America think that corn is expensive now, wait 'til one of their own assumes power in the U.S. and implements energy policies that make their very existence untenable, and not just much more difficult, as the current U.S. energy policy, with its economically and ecologically disastrous focus on ethanol, has done.

And we know Hillary's not about to propose that we increase the percentage of energy produced "alternatively" in the United States by adding new nuclear power plants. Add to that the fact that, because she and every other Democrat worthy of the name are in the hip pocket of Greenpeace and several other radical environmentalist groups, Hillary's not about to open up oil fields in Alaska or off the Gulf Coast of the United States to help reduce our foreign-oil dependency, and you've got the perfect storm for continued high oil prices.

Absent any truly workable alternatives to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, and absent any comprehension of the way a capitalist economy functions, Hillary is left with the spoils of her own and her party's willful ignorance. As a result, this iteration of a Clinton presidential campaign is being sucked into the very black hole that it created as it collapses under the weight of its own emptiness.