Saturday, February 02, 2008

Quick Hillary Notes

Who's the Establishment Candidate? With the Kennedy family, Oprah Winfrey, and a bunch of Democratic governors endorsing him, Barack Obama now looks much more like an establishment candidate than Hillary. There's a "Clintonista" faction of people like Terry McAuliffe in top Democratic circles, but it's just a faction. Broader Democratic elites haven't been any more accepting of Hillary Clinton than the media. They're living the fantasy that Obama will take the country beyond the "politics of polarization" and that they can all be moderate and collegial and that they won't have to fight to get anything done. When will they ever learn?

How Valuable the Kennedy Endorsement? Not very. Ted Kennedy's a much more compromised figure than even Bill Clinton. Decades after Chappaquiddick, Kennedy was still partying like it was 1959. And how does a Kennedy endorsement make Obama look young and vital? Although Kennedy's done many valuable things as a legislator, he's a throwback to the mind-boggling hypocrisy of the John F. Kennedy administration (Sing "Happy Birthday, Mr. Presid-e-e-e-nt" in your best sing-song voice to get an idea of what I'm talking about) and a dinosaur who embarrassed everybody at the 2004 Democratic convention.

Not a great moment for Obama.

Hillary More Inspiring than Obama. One of the things I found interesting about the Thursday debate was that Hillary Clinton was more inspiring than Obama on issues like health care. Hillary started with a strong statement Democratic Party principles of universal access to health care and then talked about the details of her proposals. That gave her proposals a sense of drama and purpose that Obama's litany of details couldn't match.

The Bill Problem. I don't have much of a problem acknowledging that Bill Clinton's undisciplined, shoot-from-the hip pronouncements and "it's all about me" narcissism would be an occasional problem for a Hillary Clinton administration. But it also looks like a manageable problem because Bill Clinton can recognize when he screws up just as well as anybody else can and now he's sticking to his talking points. One of the things I like about Hillary, and about Bill, is that they learn from their mistakes. I haven't seen that in Barack Obama or his people yet.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow! Playing the Chappaquiddick card, are we now?

I guess I'm not terribly surprised at the slime you're willing to throw for the sake of shilling for your favorite empty suit.

After all, you've now tied your bloated ego into a Hillary victory, right?