What’s the matter with the Clintons?

Believe it or not, I was already re-reading Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter With Kansas? before this whole stupid “bitter” thing hit the presidential campaign.  It was particularly nice of the Huffington Post to improve my karma by tracking down Frank for a comment:

“People are bitter in small towns,” Frank told the Huffington Post. “People are bitter everywhere. I don’t know if you have seen the stock market — people are bitter about their situation. It doesn’t strike me as a very controversial statement.”

This doesn’t do much to meet my purpose for reading the book, updating my lectures in very recent American history.  This passage from What’s the Matter With Kansas? (p. 176), however, does:

Clinton’s move to accommodate the right was the purest folly.  It simply pulled the rug out from any possible organizing effort on the left.  While the Cons were busy polarizing the electorate, the Dems were merely seeking the center.

Frank goes on to summarize the thinking of a particularly astute Kansas conservative:

If basic economic issues are removed from the table, Gietzen has written, only the social issues remain to distinguish the parties.  And in such a climate, Democratic appeals to people of ordinary means can be easily neutralized.

“Bittergate” clearly demonstrates that Hillary Clinton is willing to relive the Democratic nightmare that was the 1990s as long as she’s President.