'HILLARY CLINTON seems to have a lot of anger. I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates." So said Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Of all the insults you can hurl at Hillary Clinton -- and I've hurled a few myself -- surely the weirdest is that she's "angry." Passionless? Yes. Robotic? Definitely. But angry? I've seen ATM machines angrier than her. Her voice never wavers from a flat, dull monotone. Her gesticulations are limp. And it's not just on the surface.
Since joining the Senate, she has cozied up to her worst enemies, people who all but accused her of practicing witchcraft, and made nice with them. Whatever the polar opposite of angry is, it's her.
Yet Mehlman is widely understood to be signaling the main line of attack that Republicans will deploy against Clinton. What's behind such a strange charge?
Part of it is the Republican habit of calling anybody who makes a sharp criticism of President Bush "angry." They have further conflated anti-Bush "anger" with left-wing radicalism. The term of art that has made its way into mainstream news coverage is "angry Bush-hating left." The implicit suggestion is that anybody who disagrees too sharply with Bush is angry, and therefore ideologically radical, and therefore shouldn't be taken too seriously.
In reality, "anger" at Bush has little to do with ideology. The president is disdained with roughly equal passion by the moderates at the Democratic Leadership Council and the true lefty activists in the party who hate their wishy-washy guts.
Plenty of Republicans also believe Bush has been an abject disaster as a president, though they tend not to say so publicly. Clinton is a certifiable moderate who thinks that Bush is a historically awful president. Republicans want to define that category -- strongly anti-Bush moderates -- out of existence.
THE MAIN STORY here, though, is that the GOP is trying to find a way to adapt its patterns of characterological attack to a potential female candidate. Think of the criticisms you have heard about previous (male) Democratic candidates. The most popular one is "flip-flopper," a charge leveled with equal fervor against Bill Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry. Before the last election, top Republicans also put the word out in the media that they called John Edwards the "Breck girl" and that Kerry "looks French."
