posted by Damozel | Conservative Andrew Sullivan gives the debate to Hillary (reluctantly). "She did well, it seems to me. There were times when her robo-lecture act began to wear down my ear-drums, but, in general, Senator Clinton bestrode the debate as an authoritative figure. In fact, I've never witnessed a U.S. political debate in which a woman clearly dominated as she did tonight." The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan, Damn (3 June 2007). .Reminds me of that certain Spy Magazine cover from the old days.
Reminds me as well of the Southern Lady's erstwhile Hillary-bashing. "We didn't vote for her. She pushes him around; you can tell." . She couldn't even keep him from But nowadays,The Southern Lady likes Hillary Clinton.. I can see why, actually; for a Democrat, she makes a credible candidate for a life-time voter-for-Republicans, better maybe even than Richardson, the Southern Lady's current favor. She's everything the Republican candidates would have us believe they are, but are not. Which is why she scares hell out of all of them and out of some Dems as well.
On one point, Hillary and I differ. She thinks Bush has made us safer? Sullivan, a conservative: "I suspect we are much less safe than we were, say, two years ago. Fueling Jihad with an incompetent, half-assed occupation of a Muslim country is the worst of all worlds for national security." The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan, Damn, supra. Even so, her proud martial bearing evokes ancient queens and warrior princesses of song and story: Gloriana, Britomart, Hippolyta. It's a powerful draw.
Mark Halperin at TIME's assessment of her performance in the debate:
Able to look commanding and presidential even as she fielded niggling, hoary questions that bordered on the absurd. Never lost her temper, her focus or her cool, and even dispatched a crowd-pleasing Dick Cheney zinger. Occasionally lapsed into the weary defensiveness she displayed during the health care wars of '93 and various subsequent Clinton sagas. Bottom line: came in the front-runner and leaves in a stronger position.
The June 3 Democratic Debate, TIME (3 June 2007).
Yep, yep, she needs to watch that "weary defensiveness." Here's a favorite Hillary moment of Camille Paglia's:
My peak Web moment of recent weeks was watching the riveting video of Code Pink's March 2003 confrontation with Hillary Clinton in a Senate conference room. I whooped and applauded as Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar group, spoke eloquently of the trauma and horror inflicted by the invasion on the women and children of Iraq (a subject consistently ignored by the American press).
There's a priceless moment when a protester strips off her pink slip and hands it to Hillary (who had just voted for the war resolution the prior October) as a symbol of her flunking this ethical test. Hillary, who has problems when life departs from script, at first takes the gift, then yanks her hand back and loses her temper. The hapless slip is seized by a female flunky and abducted. It's a classic!
Camille's Back, Salon.com (links; in original, where I also found the link to the Spy Magazine Cover!)
Speaking as a Democrat, I think Code Pink sets back the cause of liberalism 20 years every time they engage in one of their awkward demonstrations---immediately after seeing them protesting McCain's "Bomb Iran" "joke," all my animosity shifted from McCain to them, and it took a day or so before I could reason myself back to the correct view of them. You can't embarrass people into doing the right thing while being embarrassing yourself; it's too damn embarrassing. Whenever I see them I think of the Nick Hornby character in About A Boy who practically collapsed in upon himself like a black hole from the embarrassment of watching a teenaged boy and his mom sing Seventies songs with their eyes closed as if they meant them. Nowadays total sincerity and earnestness just seem manipulative and I'm surprised that the hard-shelled Paglia doesn't see it that way. I thought she was all about the hieratic assertion of charismatic personality..
So my sympathies here are all with H. Clinton. If only she'd had the presence of mind to cry, "Eeeeeew" in a dismayed tone before yanking back her hand; or had simpered and said, "Hey, thanks!" and winked, she would have owned the whole thing.
But is she or is she not a hawk? Based on the debate, Sullivan says yes. "was frankly surprised to hear her state baldly that "we are safer than we were," referring to the Bush administration's counter-terrorism policies."The Daily Dish by Andrew Sullivan, Damn, supra." Chris Mathews agrees. On the May 8 edition of Hardball, Matthews asserted that Clinton is "a hawk. I'm sorry, she's a hawk. The president's a hawk. Rudy's a hawk."" Matthews likened position of "hawk" Clinton on war to Bush and Giuliani, contrasted with Hagel, Media Matters for America (9 May 2007). Media Matters Online begged to differ. So do I:
On a Thursday afternoon in early May, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton rose before a nearly empty Senate chamber and proposed that Congress undo one of the most significant acts in its recent history: the authorization of the Iraq war. In remarks lasting just two minutes, she spoke bluntly: The “authorization to use force has run its course, and it is time to reverse the failed policies of President Bush and to end this war as soon as possible.” She added, “If the president will not bring himself to accept reality, it is time for Congress to bring reality to him.”...
And yet even as she has backed away from her original vote to allow the war, she has also resisted pressure from within her party to apologize for it. Instead, she has presented voters with a version of her record that places more emphasis on her reservations about going to war than on her support for the president. Along the way, important aspects of that record — like how much of the available intelligence she reviewed before her vote — have escaped scrutiny.
Hillary’s War, The New York Times (29 May 2007).
I'll say it again: only a moron or a knave (a word we need to bring back) doesn't shift position after acquiring information not available at the time of a previous decision. The whole "flip flop" thing is---I'll use Al Gore's term, though I don't know if he talks about it---an assault on reason. She is right not to apologize. A person acting in good faith, and I believe that she is, makes the best judgments he or she can on the available information, end of.
So many of the men treat her the same way the geeks and jocks in my high school class treated one of the really smart girls in the class who made straight A's and never showed the slightest interest in any of them. She filled them all with atavistic terror when she glanced over to see why they were whispering and giggling and shuffling their feet, and then just raised a single, amused eyebrow. That was all it took to silence them.
Personally, I don't think Hillary is either a "hawk" or a "dove" but someone who makes decisions based on reason and logic and the facts available to her at the time. This is so unusual that most people don't know what to make of it when they see it; it infuriates progressives, who want her to push a progressive agenda; and it puzzles conservatives who fear (I guess) her hieratic assertions of charismatic/robotic personality (read Paglia's Sexual Personae to understand the strange power that has accrued to her since the days when she failed to become Bill Clinton's injured spouse)
...you know what I miss? I miss Hillary's hairband. Bring back "dowdy" Hillary! As an acknowledged southerner myself, I dislike the hard-as-nails, glossed-up, banked-down image she now projects. I felt better about her during the "polyglot" business because she showed she hasn't forgotten how to build rapport with an audience, bless her.
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Anyway: here's to Hillary, the deft, the intellectually supple, the adroit; the one piece in the game that can---and does---move in any direction she wants to. Her "dear husband" will make one hell of a roving ambassador. And she's going to be president: if not the next time, eventually. But probably next time.
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