click Hillary posing with the ambassador from Trunobulax, to enlarge...
If you follow the Democratic Presidential nomination, you may have seen the swell of articles in the 'papers, Websites/blogs/and news sites, predicting the demise of Hillary Clinton. All of a sudden, the press have descended like the pack of jackals they are (and God bless them BTW). Now her star is falling, and it's open season.
You may have noticed I love politics. . .and hardball, and if you're in the game you have to be able to pitch and hit the hardballs. Beginning with the withdrawal of Senator Joe Biden from the race (really, the only person I could wholeheartedly get behind), I have become extremely dejected. Today, the Drudge Report and other media outlets focused on Hillary's "emotional" statement yesterday: "Senator Hillary Clinton got emotional and had tears in her eyes as she spoke with voters about how hard it is to balance a busy campaign life and her passion for the country's future." Got emotional!? If she had been angry, of course, it would not have been characterized as emotional, but reported something like "Hillary Clinton gives spiritied response to heckler." On the Drudge report main page alone today, these articles all appeared. . .none of which portray Sen. Clinton or her campaign in a favorable light:
HILLARY UNLOADS: YOU'RE NO MARTIN LUTHER KING
HILLARY TEARS IN EYES...
'IT'S NOT EASY'
...VIDEO...
Rivals React...
VIDEO: BILL SAYS HE CAN'T MAKE HILLARY 'YOUNGER, TALLER, MALE'...
...Answers call from wife during speech: 'I love you!'
FLASH: RASMUSSEN South Carolina: Obama 42% Clinton 30%...
NEW HAMPSHIRE 2008...
DIXVILLE NOTCH: First votes counted; Clinton gets none...
WASH POST HILLARY VIDEO: 'FIRED UP AND READY TO BORE'...
VIDEO: 'Iron My Shirt!': Screaming Men Disrupt Clinton Event...
MAG: Clinton campaign faces a 'cash crunch'...
TALK OF HILLARY EXIT ENGULFS CAMPAIGN...
'She did not work this hard to get out after one state! All this talk is nonsense'...
Clinton Fires Back: Obama, Edwards Given 'Free Ride'...
Man, oh man, oh man, oh man. I have read Matt Drudge for years and am able to read him with a good filter. But this is just depressing. Everyone is unloading on Senator Clinton. Yeah, she may have "asked for it" (another allusion that used to be used to explain away rape), and that's life when you're the front runner. Well, she isn't the front runner anymore. And it feels like people are taking advantage of the situation. Now that she's down, it's time to give her a curb stomp. And yet today, her campaign, and perhaps the Senator herself have begun playing the race card: "HILLARY UNLOADS: YOU'RE NO MARTIN LUTHER KING." I thought ganging up on Hillary was depressing. But her campaign's apparent reaction is even more depressing. . .if it can be tracked backed to her strategists. I guess it probably can.
Today, in Dover, Francine Torge, a former John Edwards supporter, said while introducing Mrs. Clinton: “Some people compare one of the other candidates to John F. Kennedy. But he was assassinated. And Lyndon Baines Johnson was the one who actually” passed the civil rights legislation. So now, the Senator's camp is playing the race card? This is even more depressing than the rest of the news! And to boot, they toss in the assassination card.
Quoting from the New York Times politics blog:
"Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama have been in a running feud arising from her suggestion at Saturday’s debate that he was raising “false hope.”
"Mr. Obama responded that Mr. Kennedy did not decide going to the moon was a false hope and that Martin Luther King, Jr. did not see ending segregation as such.
“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” Mrs. Clinton said when asked about Mr. Obama’s rejoinder by Fox’s Major Garrett after her speech in Dover. “It took a president to get it done.”
"The Obama campaign declined to comment on either of those remarks."
This has become so disheartening that I have thought of abandoning politics here altogether, skipping the caucus, and maybe even not bothering to vote. That won't happen, but I am sitting here utterly dejected tonight. This has not been a good week. It's rare when I get the blues, but these past few days have trying. A co-worker committed suicide, and now it feels like the political party I have worked for since I doorbelled for Sen. George McGovern in Oregon in 1972 is also committing suicide.
I can live with whoever we finally nominate. I will work for and send money to whoever we nominate, but tonight, I'm not feeling the love; I'm not feeling the passion; what I am feeling is down down down. You may have correctly apprehended that I am a glass half-full person. Tonight I am down to the corners.
The corners is about as obscure a reference as you could possibly find. It isn't even Google-able. Let me explain. Hobos often collected old (capped) liquor bottles. If you hold a lighter to an empty bottle of vodka, gin, bourbon, etc., the residual liquor, say, half an ounce or so, will slowly collect in a corner at the bottom of the bottle. If you have enough bottles, you may even get a buzz. So far this campaign has transmogrified me from a relentless optimist of the glass half-full school to searching for corners.
---o0o---
1 comment:
Jack, you sure don't sound like yourself. But why so downhearted? There is good news here. Obama may, and it's still far from certain that he will win the nomination, build a majority that will mobilize the party for real change. It shouldn't surprise us that Joe didn't make a go of it. He never seemed to want it all that much anyway. What else explains his silence on the experience question? Perhaps Obama is right. They want to keep folks in Washington long enough so that they can "boil all the hope of of them". Joe was so tuned to Senate collegiality that his sense of decorum wouldn't allow him, despite his considerable charm, to to debunk that her inflated resume claims. And when Joe left she really started to crow "35 years".
I don't think this is a matter of the female interloper upsetting the old boys club. That is almost as insulting as her campaign's regular and, now we see, coordinated smears that culminated with the brain dead MLK/JLK/LBJ comparisons. This is matter of a monstrous political machine undone by hubris. And if there is any truth to the stories that her campaign's burn rate is depleting its cash reserves then she's toast.
Bill was a great and masterful in petty political battles. But the only thing he saved, ever, was his own skin. What is promising, even HOPEFUL, about Obama is that we can imagine that he really does want to mobilize us and not some crony rigged party.
One final question: Isn't it a little funny that Mark Penn, microtrend visionary, missed the incredible death rate among the Hillary's strongest bloc of support. A quick GIF indicates that 2million Pre WWII folks are dying each year. Her margins, such as they are, are melting like faster than Greenland.
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