She’s probably a bad driver too
More anti-Hillary bullshit: Missteps Mar Clinton’s Competency Message.
Andrew Sullivan linked to this piece with a title that more accurately reflects the authors’ intentions: Can She Run Anything?
Of course not! She’s a girl. Girls can’t do anything right.
Why doesn’t CBS/Politico run similarly negative articles on Obama? Why not, say, “Pattern of lying mars Obama’s claim to bring hope and change”? Or “Dirty campaign tricks mar Obama’s claim to be a new kind of politician”? Or “Secret plans and actual voting record mar Obama’s claim to be anti-war”? Or “Attitudes to social security, health care, and women’s rights mar Obama’s claim to be progressive”?
At least all of those would actually be true.
But the problem is that nobody in the media is writing about that, so the rest of the media can’t report on it. See, that’s how the circle jerk works: write some bullshit as an opinion piece or column, then let the rest of the media report on the “story” you’ve created.
In this case, the seeds were provided by Peter Beinart and E.J. Dionne Jr., who both wrote columns this week in the Washington Post about what an incompetent twit (or should that be twat?) Hillary is. That made it a story that Politico could report on, as in, “Everyone agrees that Hillary has too many icky girl cooties to be President. But just how icky are her cooties? Normal icky or super-duper icky?”
I have a few questions for the authors of this masturbatory aid masquerading as an article:
1. You claim that “a fair measurement of the candidates’ leadership skills is their management of their campaign.” Assuming that’s true (though I don’t think it is), can you point me to that gigantic pile of news stories from past election years arguing that a male candidate was incompetent to be President because his campaign made some mistakes?
2. Speaking of sucky campaigns, isn’t it a tad rich — I’m talking foie gras slathered in butter with a topping of macadamia nuts and Crisco — to go to John Kerry’s deputy campaign manager for a quote on how great Obama’s operation is?
3. And while we’re on the topic of biased sources, how about mentioning that E.J. Dionne is a useless tool who claims that Hillary is manufacturing allegations of sexism (which, according to Dionne, doesn’t really exist)? As for Beinart, I don’t know what his deal is, but I’m fascinated by his bizarre belief that Obama is committed to pushing through universal health care. Are these guys even paying attention?
4. How can you report on the success of Obama’s campaign without mentioning the extraordinary kid-glove treatment from the press? You note that Obama has been able to recover from various idiotic mistakes (clumsy and repeated lies about Wright and Rezko, just to name two examples) without explaining that the reason he’s been able to recover is because the press is in his goddamn pants. Obama didn’t magically excrete that Teflon coating; it was given to him by a biased press corps that refuses to subject him or his campaign to even minimal scrutiny. Meanwhile, Hillary is endlessly vilified for every single thing she does — and for quite a few things she hasn’t done at all.
5. Why isn’t David Axelrod mentioned in your article? Even once? It’s like writing about Dubya’s political packaging without mentioning Karl Rove. David Axelrod is very, very good at packaging, and I think you could make a strong argument that he’s better at running that kind of campaign than Hillary Clinton is. Ergo, David Axelrod should be President. Right?
6. Which brings me to another issue: if Clinton is so incompetent, how is it that she’s managed to win every single big state except Obama’s home turf of Illinois? How is that she’s managed to win the majority of self-identified Democrats? And done it despite constant media sabotage and a war chest that’s a fraction of Obama’s? By the same token, if Obama is a Napoleon of the campaign trail, why hasn’t he sewn up the nomination? Why hasn’t he won a single big state except for Illinois? Even with rivers of money and the press helping him out, he still can’t clinch the deal.
7. John McCain’s campaign has run out of money, broken laws, changed campaign managers, had its website pranked, and failed to keep the creepy old man on script with reporters. So when will you be running a piece on how McCain is too incompetent to be President? Oh, right — you need a pundit to seed the story for you first. I won’t be holding my breath.
11 Responses to “She’s probably a bad driver too”
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Li says:
Violet, thank you from the bottom of my shrill-beating feminist heart for your Hillary blogging. You are wonderful.
April 10th, 2008 at 2:21 am EST -
Mary Tracy9 says:
“But just how icky are her cooties? Normal icky or super-duper icky?”
HA HA!!!
Think about it this way: YOU are writing about this. And you are making your readers laugh in the process.
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Nan says:
Minor point - Clinton isn’t pushing universal health care either. Her proposal is better than Obama’s, but not by much. Both of them are promoting universal health insurance, not universal care. There is a difference, and I wish people would harass both candidates on that issue and push them away from the insurance industry and more towards a single payer system that really would provide universal access to health care.
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julia says:
Why is it so hard to find out anything significant about Obama? I did a search and found his true conservative ties, anti- civil liberties votes, pro-big business, campaigned hard for Joe Lieberman (but of course he’s against the war!) at infoshop.
I don’t have the site but if you search infoshop Obama Matt Gonzalez you will find it.At this point, I don’t think I can sway any pro-Obama person’s vote w/ this. We Americans love glitter and rhetoric more than plain facts.
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hg says:
Which brings me to another issue: if Clinton is so incompetent, how is it that she’s managed to win every single big state except Obama’s home turf of Illinois? How is that she’s managed to win the majority of self-identified Democrats? And done it despite constant media sabotage and a war chest that’s a fraction of Obama’s? By the same token, if Obama is a Napoleon of the campaign trail, why hasn’t he sewn up the nomination? Why hasn’t he won a single big state except for Illinois? Even with rivers of money and the press helping him out, he still can’t clinch the deal.
This is the glaring neon-bright elephant in the corner that Obamaphiles and the media try to ignore: The man cannot close the deal against the baby-eating, oh-so-odious Hillary. And if he can’t do that after 4 months and all the benefits in the world, how can we expect him to sweep out Heroic Maverick Warrior McCain in the GE? I’m more afraid than ever that we are in for another 4 years of Rethug darkness that will drive this country over the cliff.
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Apostate says:
Great post as usual. I have supported Clinton unreservedly so far and because I can’t vote (not a citizen) I got my husband to vote for her.
But this concerns me.
Ehrenreich disappointed me once by mentioning Clinton’s “cackle” so she isn’t a reliable source on Clinton — but still, I trust Ehrenreich to get it right on a huge thing like this. I’m just mostly surprised that if this is true, it hasn’t come to light before, since Clinton has been relentlessly examined by the media for years.
Would love to know your thoughts.
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Violet says:
The Ehrenreich hit piece was an embarrassment — to Ehrenreich, I mean. It struck me as an obvious attempt to distract attention from the Wright fiasco. I remember people like Kevin Drum and Bob Somerby kind of going, WTF? The whole “Illuminati meets Moral Majority” theme of Ehrenreich’s piece was just wild — but I think she was taking her tone straight from the guy whose big “expose” she was quoting. As for that guy, Jeff Sharlet, I don’t know if he’s paranoid or just trying to turn a buck, but there’s no question in my mind that the picture he’s trying to paint is a grotesque distortion.
The group Hillary belongs to is the group that runs the National Prayer Breakfast, which of course the President and everybody attends. Its other activity is little prayer cells for the Washington political types — it was a political wives’ cell that Hillary joined and that helped her get through the Lewinsky thing. She wrote about it in her book; it’s not a secret. Everybody in Washington knows about the group and the Christians who go in for bible study typically join the cells. You can make it sound ominous — which is what Sharlet tries to do — but it’s no more ominous than the bible study cell my aunt belongs to or the Sunday school classes my grandfather taught for 30 years.
There are unquestionably conservative Christians in those cells — people like Sam Brownback, for instance — but there are also some liberal Christians like Hillary. It’s a mixed group. It always surprises me that liberal Christians engage in fellowship with conservative Christians, but they do, all the time. You can go to the most liberal, gay-loving, feminist Episcopalian church, for example, and they’ll tell you that any Christian is welcome, even fire-breathing freaks like Brownback. It’s a point of honor with them. (I wouldn’t do it, but then I’m not a Christian.)
Personally I’d prefer none of our candidates were religious, but alas, Hillary is a lifelong Christian. The consolation is that she is a liberal Christian: she imbibed both Paul Tillich and Christian social justice theory as a young woman. She’s no fundamentalist, not by a long shot. Not even close.
When she addressed a Baptist church in South Carolina during the campaign, she made a point of saying that “women’s rights are human rights” — and this to a crowd that is still on the fence on that issue. I was proud of her for that. Probably cost her some votes, but she wasn’t going to speak at that church without making it clear how she felt.
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julia says:
Hillary’s style of Christianity sounds pretty harmless to me. Have we ever had a president that was not religous? This is such a religous country, I think it would be a big point against anyone running if they were aetheist. Almost as bad as being single!
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scottreads says:
Yeah, the Ehrenreich piece was doofy. She’s a freaking Methodist! When a traditional mainline Protestant is portrayed as a Krazy Kult Kween, you know the writer is smoking something with that powerful Hillary Hate as the main ingredient. Kookoo for Cocoa Puffs!
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reader says:
Hey I tried to e-mail you today but it “failed” even though the address was the usual…
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zuzu says:
On the Fellowship: Politico recently ran an item in which either Obama or Obama’s people confirmed that he, too, was a member.
Don’t have a link, but I found it originally through Google.
On the competence of the campaign: George Bush’s campaign was scarily competent. And yet his Presidency has not been.
