Hunting Presidents

 

Hunting Presidents

Peter Schultz

 

                  There is an interesting book entitled The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. It’s a well-written and persuasive book, with one very large omission: It fails to recognize that hunting presidents – and other politicians, commentators, and pundits – is an American pastime, even to the point of being fatal at times.  

 

                  Hunting and being hunted are as common in American politics as are politicians. Richard Nixon hunted and was hunted for his entire career. LBJ hunted and was hunted his entire career, as did Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George Bush I and II, Dick Cheney, Lee Atwater, and so on and so forth. And then there are those who were fatally hunted: Huey Long, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Lee Harvey Oswald, and others who were severely injured like George Wallace.  So, there was nothing unique about the ten-year campaign to destroy the Clintons. It was just American politics as usual.

 

                  There is another interesting book entitled American Dreamer, which is a biography of Henry A. Wallace, FDR’s vice president for one term and cabinet member, along with being one of the nation’s and the world’s leading proponents of scientific agricultural.  Because of his views, primarily because he advocated ending the Cold War and working for peace after World War II by seeking accommodations with the Soviet Union, Wallace was attacked in ways that make the campaign against the Clintons look like child’s play. And even after Wallace left office and was no longer seeking any office, the attacks continued. They only ended with Wallace’s death. The self-righteousness of Wallace’s enemies was, to say the least, impressive.

 

                  And, of course, the hunting continues now, along with the self-righteousness of the hunters. Trump and his supporters are self-righteousness toward Harris and Democrats, while Harris and the Democrats are self-righteous toward Trump and his supporters, ala’ Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.” The sense of righteousness among our politicians is odd in that it is difficult to think of them as anything other than abysmal failures. It is difficult to think of successful policies that emanated from either party over the past few decades. Moreover, their failures are rather glaring. The government failed to prevent not one but two attacks on the World Trade Center, failed to prevent an insurrection following the 2020 election, invaded Afghanistan and stayed, winless, for 20 some years, invaded Iraq looking for non-existent WMDs, while creating a fiasco that led to the growth and strengthening of Islamic terrorists, and undertook a war on terror that has fed the forces of terrorism. It seems rather ironic: in the face of abysmal failures, self-righteousness flourishes. But then the political arena is an arena where irony abounds.