The Hillary Haters
As the phrase “President Hillary Clinton” comes closer to being a reality, legions of her haters are out in full force—passing out anti-Hillary buttons, posting spiteful YouTube videos, and obsessively searching for the Swift Boat moment they hope will sink her campaign. But what, exactly, do they hate about her? As GQ discovers, even they don’t know anymore
By Jason Horowitz; Photograph by Christopher Griffith
On a screen in a back room of an upscale Dallas restaurant, a cartoon version of Hillary Clinton veers between bored and apoplectic. In the cartoon, in which she hosts a late-night program called The Hillary Show, her teeth are pointed, resembling fangs. She mocks everyone she comes across (including her “sidekick,” Howard Dean) and exhibits her violent streak by leaping out of a chair to bash Al Gore over the head with a wooden mallet, the “Hillary Hammer.”
“Another loser,” she says.
A knowing chuckle spreads through the audience of about fifteen local Republican activists and donors, including an associate of Karl Rove. Many of the attendees, mostly middle-aged and mild-mannered, wear nametags and anti-Hillary buttons on their suit lapels and silk blouses. The lights come on, and a tall, youthful 60-year-old man steps in front of the screen. Across his gray suit and broad yellow tie the projector beams Hillary’s scowling face and a White House seeped in bloody red.
“Wanted to reach out and involve you in our effort—in our Web site,” Dick Collins, a veteran Republican fund-raiser, says in his languid Texas drawl. He favorably compares his Stop Her Now Web site—a clearinghouse of anti-Hillary news, blogs, and cartoons, all with the mission of “Rescuing America from the radical ideas of Hillary Clinton”—to “the Swifties,” the nonprofit advocacy group the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which mortally wounded the campaign of John Kerry in 2004. He then proudly refers to the Stop Her Now banner, which his group has flown over a number of Clinton’s campaign appearances, as a way to attract potential supporters and irritate Hillary. “I’m sure she said to her aide, ‘We need to get a bazooka and take that thing down.’ That’s the real Hillary that nobody gets to see.” This wouldn’t be recognizable as a punch line in any other room, but supporters laugh approvingly and put down their white wine and orange cheese cubes to clap.
Collins thinks his use of “humor” will allow his anti-Hillary venture to succeed where others have failed, and that his cartoons and sight gags will ultimately play a major role in preventing Hillary Clinton from becoming president. “You do it with satire,” he explains to his guests. “Because it is a much more effective way to define somebody.”
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