December 4, 2007--Kindergarten Cop

I don’t know about you, but when I was in Kindergarten I was having so much trouble just learning my A, B, Cs and trying not to pee in my pants that I didn’t have much time left to write essays about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Forget being able to speculate about becoming president. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a president. I’m not even sure I knew the school had a principal. Fireman was still looking pretty good to me.

So Hillary Clinton, to retort Barack Obama’s dig that he (in contrast to her) hadn’t spent the last 35 years planning to be president, snapped back that at least she, unlike him, hadn’t written a paper while in Kindergarten about “Why I Want to be President.”

To get further under her skin—it was already making her crazy that she was slipping in both the national and Iowa polls—he offhandedly and calmly said, “Well I guess we’re getting into the silly season.”

Hillary is having an anger problem. Early on when it seemed inevitable that she would receive the nomination she ran what the pundits called a national campaign. Essentially, she ignored her Democratic rivals, at most brushing them away as if they were pesky insects. In her speeches and in the debates she artfully treated them as if they weren’t there, concentrating all her attention on the Bush administration and the Republican’s also-inevitable candidate, Rudy Giuliani. It looked for a time as if the other Democrats were either auditioning to be her VP running mate or, in the case of Joe Biden, Secretary of State.

But all of this changed two debates ago when she got tangled up in the sticky drivers-licenses-for-illegal-immigrants brouhaha. Right before everyone’s eyes she flipped and flopped and then flipped again. It was one of those quintessential moments when what one suspected all along—that she would do or say anything to be elected—became manifest.

It was also during that debate that her principal rivals finally found the courage to take her on. Knocked off her pins by that (up to that point she had been sailing along being attacked only by "Clinton-hating" Republicans) she also revealed her nasty side--something else many unsuspected had been held in check just below the surface of feigned amiability.

As a result, blood spilled into the water and we at last had a race. Now Obama and Hillary are going at each other while Edwards, smiling disingenuously, is standing far back away from the fray. He who had been the first to challenge Clinton and thus took the risk of alienating voters, especially those who saw this in gender terms—both Clintons tried to help fuel this--and in Iowa where they like their campaigns to be civil and not personal.

So Hillary finds herself in a pickle. Her front-runner status was based more on her inevitability and competence than on any wellspring of affection or good feeling. In fact, recent polls find more than half the potential voters see her by far to be the most “ego-driven” candidate and shockingly few view her as “likable.” Lest one think this latter quality to be insignificant and even superficial, most of our recent presidents won in large part because, all things being sort of equal, they were perceived to be more likeable than their opponents—the current President Bush, for example, an how-can-we-forget, the first Clinton.

In a real fight for the nomination Hillary now has to figure out how to mix it up with the eminently-likeable Obama and the newly happy-warrior Edwards. One problem for her is that what she says when engaged in retorting and attacking reads better than it sounds. Meaning that raising questions about Obama’s PAC fund and his aspirations to be president during childhood are legitimate issues, and things seem OK and within the bounds of legitimate discourse when you read the transcripts. But if you listen to her speak the words, to quote a potential caucus-goer in Iowa, her attacks are “somewhat irritating to sit through.” (See NY Times story linked below.) This is a big problem.

But I can’t stop thinking about that 5-year-old Barack in an Indonesian Kindergarten class.

First, how good is the Clinton campaign that they came up with this tidbit. Let’s give it up for her research staff. And beyond that, rather than being concerned that Obama’s ambition emerging so early in life should give us cause to worry about his being more ego-driven than Clinton, I’m pretty impressed that this little kid at such an early age was capable of even spelling the word “president.”