February 27, 2008--"Shame On You"
What happened to Hillary Clinton’s inevitability? A mere two months ago, which has turned out to be a political lifetime for her, Hillary Clinton lead by up to 20 percentage points in all national polls and by at least that much in every key primary state. Now she is fighting for her political life.
Pundits are pondering what happened to her candidacy which once seemed so certain.
Some feel that things turned during the campaign in South Carolina when Bill Clinton played the race card, which not only impelled virtually all African Americans to support Barack Obama, but also upset enough white voters to tip the state to Obama.
Others say that because of arrogance derived from the feeling that the primary season would in effect be an victory lap for Hillary before she turned to the general election, she did not plan for a campaign past Super Tuesday—she had no Plan B to mount a ground game in states that now are crucial to her ability to continue—Texas and Ohio. And since she saw her campaign anschluss as a domestic version of Shock and Awe they did not have the capacity to raise money after February 5th since they wouldn’t need to.
Some say that the wheels came off her campaign bus because Barack Obama turned out to be a remarkable candidate in his own right and quickly stood apart from the rest of the Democratic field—he was no Joe Biden or Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd. Obama’s soaring and intoxicating rhetoric inspired people to be audacious enough to have hope again.
And everything, every tactic, every attack that Senator Clinton mounted could not undercut the public’s support and infatuation for the charismatic senator from Illinois. In fact, her criticisms of him seemed only to make him seem more attractive.
Of course, the media didn’t help. The Clintons have for decades claimed that the media do not treat them fairly. They, to quote her from an early debate, “join in the piling on.” They give Obama a “free ride,” not “vetting” him as closely as they scrutinize Hillary Clinton’s record.
This was on display during last night’s debate when Clinton asserted that the moderators in all the debates have been unfair to her by always asking her the first question. She even referred to a Saturday Night Live skit in which one of the questioners, swooning at Obama, asked if he was comfortable in his chair and that perhaps he would like another pillow.
This didn’t work either and in fact became the most quoted sound bite during this morning’s debate postmortems. We could see it replayed over and over again whereas we heard not a word about her sharp answers about why her heathcare plan is truly “universal” whereas Senator Obama’s “leaves 15 million Americans uncovered.”
More controversial, but to me more persuasive, was Pat Buchanan’s politically-incorrect point that Hillary Clinton is slipping behind Obama because more and more men can’t stand the sound of her voice.
Sexist as this may sound or even be, he may very well be right.
Case in point: after her moving and eloquent final comments at last week’s debate, when she spoke so authentically and movingly about how crises had shaped her life and how she (and Obama) will be all right regardless of what happens when they compare themselves with the too many Americans who have suffered during their lifetimes, after engendering so much good will and perhaps revealing another, more attractive side to her personality, within 48 hours she was seen to be literally raging about a brochure that Obama’s campaign was distributing that she claimed was telling lies about her positions on healthcare and NAFTA.
Literally blue-in-the face, there is no other way to put this, she screamed—“Shame on you Barack Obama . . . for using techniques right out of Karl Rove’s playbook.”
This moment caught on videotape may go down as the final straw in her campaign. It not only called into question her ability to remain cool in (political) combat, raising not-so-subliminal questions about how she might behave if she were president and faced a real crisis, but it also set off so many bells and whistles for those who had been publicly humiliated by an out-of-control fifth-grade teacher or, forgive me, an angry spouse.
Admittedly, this is difficult to talk about for fear of being excoriated for being unfair to women in general, but in truth it’s not about how all men react to all women but how this particular woman can get under the skin of so many and why her “disapproval ratings” have continued to hover at the 50 percent level even among Democrats.
And lest you think that only women can make men crazy by their oratorical style, let’s recall that Howard Dean did a version of the same thing back in 2004 when his candidacy also seemed inevitable. He effectively destroyed himself after losing the Iowa caucus by screeching how he would not be deterred:
Not only are we going to New Hampshire, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York … And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! YeaAHah!!!
So much for Howard Dean.
We also saw and were turned off just last week when Bill Clinton lost it with a heckler and, with arteries bulging, raged at him. Again, as with Dean it was not so much the content as the style. And both are men.
Does it then come down to who you’d rather have a beer with? All else being sort of equal, it may very well be. It also helps explain George W. Bush.
Pundits are pondering what happened to her candidacy which once seemed so certain.
Some feel that things turned during the campaign in South Carolina when Bill Clinton played the race card, which not only impelled virtually all African Americans to support Barack Obama, but also upset enough white voters to tip the state to Obama.
Others say that because of arrogance derived from the feeling that the primary season would in effect be an victory lap for Hillary before she turned to the general election, she did not plan for a campaign past Super Tuesday—she had no Plan B to mount a ground game in states that now are crucial to her ability to continue—Texas and Ohio. And since she saw her campaign anschluss as a domestic version of Shock and Awe they did not have the capacity to raise money after February 5th since they wouldn’t need to.
Some say that the wheels came off her campaign bus because Barack Obama turned out to be a remarkable candidate in his own right and quickly stood apart from the rest of the Democratic field—he was no Joe Biden or Bill Richardson or Chris Dodd. Obama’s soaring and intoxicating rhetoric inspired people to be audacious enough to have hope again.
And everything, every tactic, every attack that Senator Clinton mounted could not undercut the public’s support and infatuation for the charismatic senator from Illinois. In fact, her criticisms of him seemed only to make him seem more attractive.
Of course, the media didn’t help. The Clintons have for decades claimed that the media do not treat them fairly. They, to quote her from an early debate, “join in the piling on.” They give Obama a “free ride,” not “vetting” him as closely as they scrutinize Hillary Clinton’s record.
This was on display during last night’s debate when Clinton asserted that the moderators in all the debates have been unfair to her by always asking her the first question. She even referred to a Saturday Night Live skit in which one of the questioners, swooning at Obama, asked if he was comfortable in his chair and that perhaps he would like another pillow.
This didn’t work either and in fact became the most quoted sound bite during this morning’s debate postmortems. We could see it replayed over and over again whereas we heard not a word about her sharp answers about why her heathcare plan is truly “universal” whereas Senator Obama’s “leaves 15 million Americans uncovered.”
More controversial, but to me more persuasive, was Pat Buchanan’s politically-incorrect point that Hillary Clinton is slipping behind Obama because more and more men can’t stand the sound of her voice.
Sexist as this may sound or even be, he may very well be right.
Case in point: after her moving and eloquent final comments at last week’s debate, when she spoke so authentically and movingly about how crises had shaped her life and how she (and Obama) will be all right regardless of what happens when they compare themselves with the too many Americans who have suffered during their lifetimes, after engendering so much good will and perhaps revealing another, more attractive side to her personality, within 48 hours she was seen to be literally raging about a brochure that Obama’s campaign was distributing that she claimed was telling lies about her positions on healthcare and NAFTA.
Literally blue-in-the face, there is no other way to put this, she screamed—“Shame on you Barack Obama . . . for using techniques right out of Karl Rove’s playbook.”
This moment caught on videotape may go down as the final straw in her campaign. It not only called into question her ability to remain cool in (political) combat, raising not-so-subliminal questions about how she might behave if she were president and faced a real crisis, but it also set off so many bells and whistles for those who had been publicly humiliated by an out-of-control fifth-grade teacher or, forgive me, an angry spouse.
Admittedly, this is difficult to talk about for fear of being excoriated for being unfair to women in general, but in truth it’s not about how all men react to all women but how this particular woman can get under the skin of so many and why her “disapproval ratings” have continued to hover at the 50 percent level even among Democrats.
And lest you think that only women can make men crazy by their oratorical style, let’s recall that Howard Dean did a version of the same thing back in 2004 when his candidacy also seemed inevitable. He effectively destroyed himself after losing the Iowa caucus by screeching how he would not be deterred:
Not only are we going to New Hampshire, we're going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we're going to California and Texas and New York … And we're going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan, and then we're going to Washington, D.C., to take back the White House! YeaAHah!!!
So much for Howard Dean.
We also saw and were turned off just last week when Bill Clinton lost it with a heckler and, with arteries bulging, raged at him. Again, as with Dean it was not so much the content as the style. And both are men.
Does it then come down to who you’d rather have a beer with? All else being sort of equal, it may very well be. It also helps explain George W. Bush.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
10:34 AM
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