Yeah, I’m late to chime in on Hillary’s appearance at the American Camp Association of New York and New Jersey’s Tri-State CAMP Conference, as reported on by Bloomberg (and multiple other outlets), and as linked to by Ann Althouse.
“We really need camps for adults,” the former secretary of state told [the audience]. “None of the serious stuff … I think we have a fun deficit in America.”
Yes, this is goofy. To be sure, this was off-the-cuff, a question-and-answer session rather than a prepared speech, but what dos this say about her mindset? Is she so isolated, after so many years as governor’s wife, then president’s wife, Washington insider, and rocketing from the upper middle class of her lawyerly days to clearly quite wealthy, that she doesn’t understand the rest of America?
News flash: “camps for adults” exist. There are “family camps,” extensions of summer camps for children, in which a portion of the grounds, or a week or two of the summer, is set aside for families, who live in cabins, eat at the dining hall or on their own, enjoy the facilities of the campgrounds, sail, swim, perhaps even horseback-ride, and, depending on the structure, have the ability to drop of the kids for supervised activities while the parents have some alone-time. And there are dude ranches and other sorts of all-inclusive outdoor-recreation vacations, and there are certainly plenty of all-inclusive resorts. If we’re talking about simply opportunities for adults to be outdoors, is she unaware of the concept called camping, in which one takes a tent, a cooler of food, and, let’s face it,a minivan full of gear, and heads out to a place called a campground, and, well, camps? Gosh, you don’t even have to have a family to camp — though, admittedly, this type of camping is a lot more work than having your meals provided for you.
Or does she mean by “need” that Americans should be provided with “camps for adults” to remedy the “fun deficit”? Something like Kraft durch Freude, perhaps, except that, since it would be sincere, good-hearted people heading up these government programs, it wouldn’t be as appalling as the Nazi version?
OK, yes, maybe she just felt the need to say something witty and clever, and it shows her lack of ability to think on her feet, as well as a basic instinct towards a desire to, as a government official, think she should try to fix everything and anything, without regard for the proper role of government.
But that sort of misses the point: what was the American Camp Association of New York and New Jersey doing shelling out the big bucks to have her as a headline speaker? — and the article clearly specifies that she was a paid speaker, and we know what her going rate is. According to the article, her “host” was “Jay Jacobs, a camp director and chairman of the Nassau County, Long Island, Democratic Party” — which sounds pretty fishy; was he abusing his position in organizing this conference to funnel money to Hillary? Or are camps in New York and New Jersey a far cry from the Scout camps and Christian camps I know, but just another type of business which chooses to have a big-money speaker come to its convention?
And what else did she say? She claims that Chelsea when to a German-language immersion camp in Michigan — wrong; the only such foreign language camp is in Minnesota.
She claimed that she planned to “focus on finding consensus across party lines.”
“If you don’t build relationships with people and all you do is show up to argue or show up to point fingers, you can’t get anything done,” she said.
After citing the importance of personal relationships during the Clinton and Bush administrations, she said,
In the years since, some of that comity has faded as members of Congress face “insatiable pressure” to raise “crazy” amounts of money, Clinton said. “And the Supreme Court made it worse,” she added.
But I don’t see how she can link pressure to raise money to the failure to build personal relationships.
I don’t think anyone really has a handle on what’s happened in Washington. Yes, the personal relationships are gone — was that simply a matter of one man, President Obama, refusing to build those relationships? Will we go back to the status quo ante, once he’s out of office?
Was the naked partisanship of passing the stimulus bill and Obamacare without any Republican support, because of the temporary complete control of Congress and the presidency, simply too poisonous?
Is the declining trust, and the increasing openness and acceptance of dishonesty, itself poisonous for a healthy bipartisan politics? I had speculated before that, while everyone distrusted politicians, the willingness to lie, and the acceptance of your guy’s lies if they further your cause, is simply far more open now. Witness Obama’s supposed opposition to gay marriage, which everyone pretty much accepted as a convenient fiction; no one believes that he truly changed his mind in later announcing his support for it. What’s the significance of this? Long-term, you’re much less likely to support a moderate who assures you he’ll listen to your concerns, and you’re more likely to support someone whose ideology is not in doubt.
And now we’ve got a situation in which, in a game of chicken, the Democrats are insisting on the removal of Hyde-like language in a human trafficking bill, to establish their power even as a minority party, and putting this ahead of the common goal of passing a widely supported bill.
I don’t see any possible world in which Hillary Clinton, well-known for putting her personal wealth and power first and foremost, can remedy the situation, rather than making it worse.
UPDATE: Here’s another link, “Hillary Clinton Warm, Resilient At Camp Conference,” which provides a wholly different context for the “adult camp” idea:
Clinton lauded camps for providing “the essential building blocks for young people” and exposing children to different races, religions and cultural perspectives. Then she pointedly drew a larger analogy around the summer getaways to the current political paralysis.
“We could have the red cabin, and the blue cabin have to come together and actually listen to each other. Wouldn’t that be a novel idea,” she said. “We really need camps for adults.”
Now, I don’t know in what world camps provide exposure to Diversity, given that they generally draw kids of a specific background, but the idea of red and blue cabins talking to each other is also pretty silly.
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