ABOUT TIME
David Brooks of the New York Times has this to say about Hillary Clinton in his op-ed piece titled "The Longest Defeat":
"Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.
Five percent...
For the sake of that 5 percent, this will be the sourest spring...
When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness."
He then asks the obvious question and then provides his own answer with some eloquence:
"Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?
The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.
For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.
No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic."
As a moderate Republican, I'm supposed to prefer Clinton over Obama, the theory being that the Republican machine would have an easier task promoting McCain vs. Clinton.
But I'm tired already of the one-note "Wright" play-book that the right-wing elements of the party are playing non-stop against Obama, and it's corrosive for the country in the extreme.
So here's hoping that the Democrats will do themselves and their party a favor, sooner rather than later.
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