First, if you’re wondering what I as a Hillary supporter think about Hillary’s decision to continue running after yesterday, the answer is I don’t know what I think of it as a strategy. Naturally I would like to believe that she could still somehow prevail. I am not sanguine. People are speculating that she is now running for the VP slot. We’ll see.
But — and this matters more to me — I most definitely admire her for her unswerving commitment to see the process through. Despite the pissing and moaning in the media, and whatever the outcome, I predict that the day will certainly arrive when people will look back with awe and amazement at Hillary’s insistence in going the distance against all odds and wish that they had chosen her. She is indomitable. I like that in a Democrat and so should other Democrats. Alas, many of them are so beguiled by the media myths about Hillary that they just can’t see what a force of nature she really is.
Obama could learn a lot from her and he’d be a better (future) president for it. Instead, I imagine we’ll be stuck with him in his current incarnation — all rhetoric, all the time.
At The New Republic, E.J. Dionne bemoans the race we ought to have had between the Democratic candidates. The article expresses the author’s wish that we could have seen a race between the Hillary who has emerged and the Obama who doesn’t exist, though naturally it’s not expressed quite in that way. In reality, of course, any perceived
changes in the candidates simply have to do with changes in voters’ changing perceptions, often as a result of the media’s framing of them.
Hillary and Obama are pretty much who they have always been. I never believed in the ‘elitist’ image of the Clintons — come on; Bill was the very effective governor of Arkansas —- and I never bought into Obama’s image as the herald (if not the messiah) of a new political awakening.
The article is full of praise for ‘the new Clinton,’ so-called.
Hillary Clinton found a compelling voice and a plausible strategy only after she had squandered her chances of winning the nomination without a divisive struggle over superdelegates and convention rules. It took a series of defeats to galvanize her campaign and help her put forward a
better self….The new Clinton is a wonder to behold. In the 1990s, Hillary and Bill Clinton were trashed by their enemies as elitist, Ivy League, McGovernite liberals–i.e., exactly the way Clinton’s people are eviscerating Obama.
But over the last month, Clinton has emerged as a working-class hero who gets knocked down, always gets up, and thus wins favorable comparisons with Rocky Balboa…Nothing becomes her so much as hardship. (TNR)
I agree with all of this, except the part that implies that she ever was anything else besides what she appears. She is both ‘an Ivy League liberal’ — no Democrat should buy into the right-wing cant that that’s a bad thing — and mature woman with first-hand, life-long knowledge of the plight of the working (and disenfranchised) poor, including, or especially, women. Of course she is. The ‘elitist’ Clinton and the ‘working class hero Clinton’ are as much media creations as Obama: Untainted Herald of a New Age in American Politics or as Obama: Secret Supporter (or enabler) of Rev. Wright’s brand of theology. None of the attempts of the media to paint them as no more than their packaging are accurate: both are real, faulty human beings with the usual mix of good and bad. I just happen to prefer Hillary’s faults, as well as her virtues (one of which is her willingness to fight for herself and her position).
I don’t have a need to believe in the moral unassailability of a presidential candidate and I’ve never understood why it’s necessary to bicker over which one is prettier and smells better. An American president needs to be someone with the outlook of an optimist and the qualities of a cynic — wily, wary, cautious, suspicious, able to read between the lines, and so on. If anything, seeing Obama’s halo knocked askew has made him seem less impossible for me to support; if his campaign were less hypocritical, I’d be feeling far less unhappy than I do about the prospect of ending up with him as a candidate. I don’t trust charisma or self-serving hazy promises of a new approach to politics; I remember Jimmy Carter’s campaign, and,whatever Carter’s virtues humanly and humanely speaking, we all know how well that presidency turned out. (Shut up, Jimmy Carter).
So unlike Dionne, I don’t wish we had the two of them packaged as the now Clinton and the previous Obama; I wish the unmasking had begun earlier or the masks had never been imposed on them in the first place.
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