Saturday, May 24, 2008

Resource depletion

Chet has a very good corrective to some of the accusations that have been levelled at Sen. Clinton in the wake of what I'm calling "hey, you never know, bang bang bang click"-gate. I agree with Chet that we should extend more charity to politicians, given that none of them are 100% perfect electoral cyborgs. But.

But Sen. Clinton has exhausted any reserves of charity and goodwill that I had towards her. Consider: as Chet mentions, there was a previous controversy involving Barack Obama, one where the word "bitter" featured prominently. And did Sen. Clinton issue a short statement saying she regretted the Senator's words, but she took him at his word that he meant no offense? Fuck me she did. No, she, the multi-millionaire policy wonk, became the whiskey-shooting, duck-hunting, "hard working white American"-loving darling of Appalachia. She clung to the "elitist" charge and ran with it for weeks. And that's only the most prominent charge against her. She ran with the William Ayers thing, she ran with Rev. White, and when all of that fizzled she brought up Hamas during the ABC debate.

So no, Sen. Clinton doesn't get charity from me anymore.

I've resisted the calls for her to drop out, but here's the funny thing: looking back on this campaign, I'm thinking she's going to wish she had dropped out sometime before Pennsylvania. If she'd dropped out after Texas and Ohio, people would remember her as the most serious female candidate ever, she'd be better-suited to argue for herself as VP, and she'd have capped off a series of losses with two wins.

And nobody would have ever heard of Bosnian sniper fire.

Nobody would have heard of "hard-working, white Americans".

And nobody would have heard about how hey, you know, RFK was killed in June.

1 comment:

That guy said...

All true, I'm afraid.

What's even more ironic is this: Clinton supporters have been saying, for months, that if Obama thinks that the Clinton Rules won't get applied to him in the general, he's nuts. How odd, then, that Clinton's campaign should be effectively ended by the Obama rules: whatever the candidate says must be interpreted in the least charitable way.