Times<\/em> de Londres, vaut le d\u00e9tour. Hillary y est pr\u00e9sent\u00e9e comme la Lady Macbeth am\u00e9ricaine, ce qui n’est pas extr\u00eamement am\u00e8ne.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tBaker est une plume typique : extraordinairement pro-am\u00e9ricaniste, pro-Bush, libre-\u00e9changiste, etc., il fait figure d’atlantiste extr\u00e9miste dans les colonnes du Times<\/em>. Son appr\u00e9ciation de Hillary Clinton est du plus haut int\u00e9r\u00eat.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00abThere are many reasons people think Mrs Clinton will not be elected president. She lacks warmth; she is too polarising a figure; the American people don’t want to relive the psychodrama of the eight years of the Clinton presidency.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbBut they all miss this essential counterpoint. As you consider her career this past 15 years or so in the public spotlight, it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic, unshameable way in which she has pursued this ambition, and confirmed that there is literally nothing she will not do, say, think or feel to achieve it. Here, finally, is someone who has taken the black arts of the politician’s trade, the dissembling, the trimming, the pandering, all the way to their logical conclusion.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbFifteen years ago there was once a principled, if somewhat rebarbative and unelectable politician called Hillary Rodham Clinton. A woman who aggressively preached abortion on demand and the right of children to sue their own parents, a committed believer in the power of government who tried to create a healthcare system of such bureaucratic complexity it would have made the Soviets blush; a militant feminist who scorned mothers who take time out from work to rear their children as women who stay home and bake cookies.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbToday we have a different Hillary Rodham Clinton, all soft focus and expensively coiffed, exuding moderation and tolerance.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbTo grasp the scale of the transfiguration, it is necessary only to consider the very moment it began. The turning point in her political fortunes was the day her husband soiled his office and a certain blue dress. In that Monica Lewinsky moment, all the public outrage and contempt for the sheer tawdriness of it all was brilliantly rerouted and channelled to the direct benefit of Mrs Clinton, who immediately began a campaign for the Senate.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbAnd so you had this irony, a woman who had carved out for herself a role as an icon of the feminist movement, launching her own political career, riding a wave of public sympathy over the fact that she had been treated horridly by her husband.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbAfter that unsurpassed exercise in cynicism, nothing could be too expedient. Her first Senate campaign was one long exercise in political reconstructive surgery. It went from the cosmetic the sudden discovery of her Jewish ancestry, useful in New York, especially when you’ve established a reputation as a friend of Palestinians to the radical: her sudden message of tolerance for people who opposed abortion, gay marriage, gun control and everything else she had stood for.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\u00bbOnce in the Senate she published an absurd autobiography in which every single paragraph had been scrubbed clean of honest reflection to fit the campaign template. As a lawmaker she is remembered mostly, when confronted with a President who enjoyed 75 per cent approval ratings, for her infamous decision to support the Iraq war in October 2002. This one-time anti-war protester recast herself as a latter-day Boadicea, even castigating President Bush for not taking a tough enough line with the Iranians over their nuclear programme.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tIl est difficile de lire des lignes plus violentes contre une femme (un homme) politique que celles-ci, qui rappellent les jugements port\u00e9s entre adversaires politiques du temps du Maccarthysme : \u00ab Mrs Clinton has raised that opportunism to an animating philosophy, a P. T. Barnum approach to the political marketplace.<\/em> [] the Clinton candidacy is a Grand Deceit, an entirely artificial construct built around a person who, stripped bare of the cynicism, manipulation and calculation, is nothing more than an enormous, overpowering and rather terrifying ego.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\tCe qui est tr\u00e8s in\u00e9dit, c’est que ces jugements d’une telle violence sur la pol\u00e9mique politique interne aux USA viennent d’un observateur \u00e9tranger, non-am\u00e9ricaniste, comme si, en v\u00e9rit\u00e9, Gerald Baker \u00e9tait citoyen am\u00e9ricain. C’est un peu le cas, n’est-ce pas ? Il y a dans l’atlantisme et le pro-am\u00e9ricanisme de certains Britanniques une sorte de naturalisation qui va de soi. Apr\u00e8s tout, Baker n’est pas tellement plus citoyen am\u00e9ricain par adoption que Tony Blair.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\tIl s’agit d’un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne r\u00e9cent, d\u00fb \u00e0 l’emprise de la coop\u00e9ration avec les USA, et surtout avec l’administration Bush, de la politique violente de cette administration et de la pr\u00e9sentation violente de cette politique (Baker en est partisan). Cela implique que les \u00e9trangers qui sont parties prenantes dans le d\u00e9bat int\u00e9rieur US, plus particuli\u00e8rement les pro-am\u00e9ricanistes, vont se trouver pris dans les pol\u00e9miques washingtoniennes internes. Ce que dit Baker de Hillary est loin d’\u00eatre faux, sur son ambition, ses m\u00e9thodes impitoyables, ses positions radicales (notamment son engagement dans les politiques bellicistes, comme elle avait d\u00e9j\u00e0 \u00e9t\u00e9 engag\u00e9e dans le soutien \u00e0 la guerre du Kosovo, o\u00f9 elle s’\u00e9tait montr\u00e9e plus belliciste que son mari). Si Hillary Clinton est \u00e9lue, les \u00e9quipes europ\u00e9ennes dirigeantes les plus pro-US elles-m\u00eames pourraient se trouver embarqu\u00e9es dans la logique d\u00e9structurante des querelles internes washingtoniennes. Par exemple, des conservateurs britanniques (comme l’est Baker) pourraient avoir des difficult\u00e9s avec une Hillary pr\u00e9sidente, en fonction de leurs liens internes avec les USA (d\u00e9j\u00e0, en 1993-97, les conservateurs de John Major avaient eu \u00e9norm\u00e9ment de difficult\u00e9s avec Clinton parce qu’ils avaient nettement pris parti pour Bush-p\u00e8re dans l’\u00e9lection de 1992). <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\tMis en ligne le 26 janvier 2007 \u00e0 13H58<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
La d\u00e9claration officielle de candidature d’Hillary Clinton a permis de remettre en perspective la situation politique aux USA, du c\u00f4t\u00e9 d\u00e9mocrate. Hillary reste la favorite et la locomotive de l’\u00e9lection. Cela permet \u00e9galement de mesurer les opinions et les r\u00e9actions \u00e0 son propos. Le commentaire de Gerald Baker, aujourd’hui dans le Times de Londres, vaut… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4094,3998,6363,3278,6362,3050,2852],"class_list":["post-68452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bloc-notes","tag-baker","tag-conservateurs","tag-gerald","tag-hillary","tag-mabeth","tag-the","tag-times"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}