As the thin pretense of DbD being a gag strip with some politics continued to give way during this period, we will find ourselves dealing with politics more and more in the personal lives of the characters. Not quite to the 'We are besties with President Trump" level of later years, but... more. Increasingly plots were going to be driven by what was happening in politics--or what Muir perceived as happening. Which makes this an excellent spot to look both back and ahead at a figure who Muir would be preoccupied with for much of the opening months of 2008.
The Clintons have always held a position of extreme hatred in Muir's mental universe. For a man who seems to have latched onto the political Right early in his life, they represented the unraveling of what had been the axiom of most of his life, the almost effortless dominance of the presidency by Republican Party. For Muir, a majority of the nation deciding they wanted to move on from Reaganism was not simply the world changing, it was a betrayal of the natural order, and possibly a conspiracy. And this was something he still had bitter feelings about from the very start of the strip.
However, Bill Clinton was not Muir's primary target of the pair, even in the early days. While Muir would snarl about the man every now and then, he seemed to understand the man was old news. Oh, he saw Bill as a permanent stain on the nation, but still, one whose time had passed, and whose designated successor had been thwarted by the glorious, sure-footed political hand of Dubya. An evil but--again, in the early days--a defeated evil. But Hillary... she was another matter.
Hillary was in the Senate, and still had an ongoing political career. She was regularly ventured as a potential presidential candidate in political commentary. And she had been just viciously disliked by the Republicans during Bill's presidency, the subject of even more grotesque rumors and conspiracy theories than her husband. All things Muir had absorbed like a sponge. Now Muir wouldn't delve deeply into that particular brand of crazy during the Mystery Business(tm) Era or the early periods of the Transition Era. Again, getting published was always the goal at this stage, and those accusations were not something that even a sympathetic paper would let you mention in a comic. But this was something that was going to lurk in the background, even then. On top of which, Muir's misogyny may not reached its present fever pitch, but it was there.
And so, the Clintons were featured quite a bit in the early years, and they were among the few Democrats to get some actual level of characterization, to be something other than a name attached to a generic caricature of Muir's interchangeable dimwitted Democrat crooks. Now, neither was a deep characterization. In fact, both were at heart just nastier versions of the pop culture slams of the pair, Bill as a corrupt degenerate horndog, and Hillary as a cold, ambitious, mannish shrew. But DbD's take on Hillary had something extra in it.
Muir genuinely tended to see Hillary as the 'boss' of the Democratic Party, and this produced something somewhat fascinating. It was not something he showed with any nuance--Muir was fairly ignorant as to how the Republicans ran as a party, much less the Democrats. No, Hillary was generally played with the energy of a 1980s' Saturday morning cartoon "boss" villain. Somewhat cleverer and more dangerous than the minions, who she treated with boundless contempt, but still fundamentally a clod created to lose. Muir was already setting the scene to it again in 2007, as the Mystery Business(tm) Era wrapped up, and was keeping it going as the Transition Era started, as he prepared for the 2008 presidential election...
