Last night the Republican candidates happily put aside their differences to criticize Hillary Clinton. They’ve found something to rally around. The Democrats can take it away.
– Eric Miller, millerec@etown.edu
One of Sullivan’s readers sums it up:
The Clintons are like the arsonist firefighter in the movie Backdraft — using their political skills to create divisive and destructive fires in an attempt to dominate their opposition, and then immediately promoting themselves as the only firefighters that will put them out. They did it in the White House by making Bill’s indiscretions a partisan issue, and now they’re doing it with the gender and race issue. And it baffles me how willing Hillary supporters are to continue to participate in this cynical and destructive mechanism.
I’m a very politically interested Dem in a large family of moderate to conservative Republicans and Independants. I can, and have, made a good case with them for Obama, but there’s no way I can justify a Hillary nomination to myself, much less to them. If the Dems are short-sighted and suicidal enough to give a Hillary the nomination instead of seizing the opportunity with Obama to create a once-in-a-lifetime historical political realignment in this country, they can count me, my family, and many of my Dem friends out this Nov.
– Eric Miller, millerec@etown.edu
Filed under: Hillary
The Blogosphere, or at least the part of it I like – the progosphere? – has been ablaze with Hillary talk these past two days, hitting largely on two themes:
1. Glenn Greenwald- in particular – has been on the warpath for weeks, attacking Hillary’s press coverage, and with good reason. Much of it has been juvenile, the rest has been flat out wrong. And since it is so clear that many of these individuals do not like her – and many of the snippets suggest that they think with a communal brain – their reporting tries to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. In New Hampshire, for instance, Obama was reported to have a dominating lead all day Tuesday and even for days in advance. The coverage was just wrong. It’s not even a debatable point – they all said very similar things, and they were just about all wrong. Keep in mind, they get paid for this. If the pundits were anywhere close to correct, Hillary would be back in New York today eating a gallon of ice cream and watching Sixteen Candles. Instead, her campaign is totally re-energized.
2. The second point, one that I felt in the pit of my stomach the second I saw the results, is that the re-energization of the Hillary campaign is a bad thing. Gil Smart sums it up pretty succinctly in his recent headline, “The Polarization Express.” The political climate in the United States has been polarized for the past seven, maybe eleven years, and most of us are tired of it. We’d like to see the semi-hereditary presidency go to someone other than a Bush or Clinton. We’d also like to see a figure who will act as a unifying force, who will dismantle the incredibly counterproducive American political discourse enough to actually fix some of these glaring problems that have come to the foreground in the past seven years – the Iraq war, our environmental crises, our healthcare crises, and our ballooning deficit. The next president will have his/her hands full of inherited problems – we the people don’t need the firestorm of idiotic “discourse” that will greet/infest the next Clinton administration.
Here’s a bit of (un)common sense to characterize the type of discourse I’m talking about - in the late nineties, our country went crazy because the president fooled around with an intern – there was an impeachment, remember? Things are a bit worse today. The Onion has a phrase for that.
But reflect: American Idol premieres again on Tuesday. Somehow we’ve managed to keep caring all along! That’s called resiliency!
