First, I should establish my anti-Hillary credentials. On Booman’s Hillary Clinton Thread, I emerged as anti-Hillary as anyone. I said that I found her insenscere and inauthentic and that I hated her, characterized her as a Lady Macbeth, and said that I would vote for a Republican that is more against the occupation of Iraq than she is instead of her for president.
A main problem with her that I have had is that she has always struck me as inauthentic, as I noted in that thread. But now I am getting the sense that she might be finding her voice.
I was struck by remarks she made in Iowa yesterday:
“I’m not ready to concede that we shouldn’t take a tough negotiating stance to figure out whether there can be some movement,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters here today. “We need to change the approach of the White House, which means you’ve got to stand firm and say, `We don’t expect you to veto something that represents the will of the American people.’ ” (NY Times)
As she traveled through Iowa, Clinton said she had launched a petition drive through her campaign Web site calling on Bush not to veto legislation now pending in Congress that, for the first time, would establish deadlines for the U.S. involvement in Iraq. “Mr. President,” she said, “don’t veto the will of the American people.”
Clinton took a sharp line against the administration in the current standoff over Iraq policy, accusing the president and Vice President Cheney of questioning the patriotism of Americans who call for an end to the U.S. involvement there.
“It is time for us to get them [U.S. forces] out of the middle of this sectarian civil war, and it is time for the president and the vice president to quit impugning the patriotism of people who don’t agree with them,” she said during a breakfast reception on Tuesday at the home of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack (D) and his wife, Christie.
During a question-and-answer session there, she accused the president of damaging the United States’ image around the world as a result of his unwillingness to work with other nations to solve problems.
“We need a president again who understands life is not simple,” she said. “You can’t just point your finger or wave a magic wand and expect everybody to do what you want them to do. We’ve got to get back to that patient, persistent diplomacy, making friends and allies.” (Washington Post)
There are two things about her remarks that I find interesting. First, she is not strategizing about what we should do once Shrub vetoes the bill: she is telling him that vetoing it would be the wrong thing to do. Since men are so much into power games and contact sports, this kind of approach doesn’t seem to have occurred to any men in Washington.
Second, she implies that Shrub thinks that you can “just point your finger or wave a magic wand and expect everybody to do what you want them to do.” In other words, she is mocking Shrub. That’s a good thing to do, but I haven’t heard any of the other Dem presidential candidates mock Shrub recently.
The reason Hillary has come across to me in the past as inauthentic is that I got the impression that she was a woman putting on an act meant to show that she could be like a man. But in the remarks I have just quoted, she definitely comes across as a woman, and that kind of woman that many men find attractive—a haughty one.
So if she directs her haughtiness at Shrub and his enablers and stops directing it at the netroots, I think I would find her more likable.
I should make it clear that I am not distancing myself at all from the apparent consensus at the BT that a Hillary Clinton presidential nomination would amount to a defeat for us, given that Hillary, like her husband, are DLC. What I am saying is that, given Obama’s pre-emptive capitulation to Bush on the Iraq war funding bill, we should drop any illusions we might have had that Obama is a more acceptable candidate for us than Hillary is.
When it comes to the three front-runners, Obama’s gaffe combined with Hillary’s catty remarks have made Obama drop to the bottom of my list.
