Shortly before I began yesterday’s post, I noticed that Barack Obama was a guest on "Hardball" and I watched a bit of the interview. Today, about an hour before I started this post, my mom called to tell me that tomorrow, Bill Clinton is going to be in Pembroke, a little town about fifteen minutes from my hometown of Lumberton. She jokingly asked me if I was going out to see him and I responded, "Nah...I already saw Dan Quayle in person. That’s enough greatness to last a lifetime." And it’s true. At least the first part. My mom and I went to see Dan Quayle speak in 1991, in the midst of Bush 1’s reelection campaign. I don’t remember anything he said at this point, but I do remember the crowd chanting, "Bush Quayle ’92!" and towards the end of his speech switching to a rousing "Quayle ’96! Quayle ’96!" I think the humor speaks for itself.
I did want to add a follow-up note to my post about Obama. The conservatives that support him seem to be blind to the fact that he’s been consistetnly rated as one of the most liberal democrats in the senate. While I haven’t heard him promise publicly funded abortions like that bastion of conservatism Rudy Guiliani (note the dripping sarcasm), he has said some scary things on the subject, most notably his proclimation in a recent stump speech that if one of his daughters was to someday make "one mistake," he wouldn’t want them to have to be "punished with a baby." Wow. On to Mrs. Clinton...
Part 2 - Hillary Clinton
Contrary to the belief of many of my conservative brethren, Hillary Rodham Clinton is probably not the antichrist. There’s no reported evidence of her stealing babies’ souls to keep herself youthful or sacrificing goats to Satan and I’m pretty sure she didn’t kill Vince Foster personally. She’s a smart, capable woman and I’m sure she’d do an excellent job of managing many things. I just don’t happen to think the country is one of them. It’s funny to me that she’s touting herself as the candidate of experience in her fight against Obama. This is only her second term in the Senate and before that she’d never held elected office. But Hillary would have you believe that being first lady should count as experience. She lived in the White House after all, right? She was advising Bill at the dinner table when all sorts of important stuff happened. She’s been to state dinners and visited other countries and shaken hands with all the important world leaders. That’s got to count for something, doesn’t it? And maybe it does. She was definitely a different kind of first lady than Laura Bush and people made jokes at the time about her being the real president. But they were only jokes. Recently released documents from her time in the White House show that she wasn’t present for the super-secret cabinet meetings she’d like you to think she chaired and her slate of activities really didn’t differ all that much from most first ladies after all. Hillary may have a slight edge over Barack in the experience department, but if so it’s only slight. And unlike Mr. Obama, Hillary hasn’t managed to convince anyone that she’s not a liberal. But honestly, while she’s definitely liberal enough that I’ll never vote for her, she has a slightly more middle-of-the road voting record than Obama and has shown a willingness to work with Republicans on a few occasions. Her problem isn’t her policy; it’s her personality. She often seems stiff and too rehearsed and never manages to appear as confident, comfortable, or friendly as Obama. You can call it sexism, but John Kerry and Bob Dole faced the same problem. After the ’96 election, the country found out via SNL and Daily Show appearances and the infamous "little blue friend" Pepsi commercial that Bob Dole was actually had a great sense of humor, something that may have helped him dethrone Bill. Maybe Hillary will lose this year’s election and afterwards appear on Oprah and cry and we’ll all discover that she’s a warm, loving, vulnerable person. If she does possess those traits, however, she may want to go ahead and let them out because Obama is charming and spending his way to the nomination. As many pundits have pointed out, Hillary and Barack differ only slightly on policy and most voters aren’t all that nit-picky. Since they both lack long-term governing experience, the primary is coming down to personality and trustworthiness. Hillary could never beat Obama on the first one and being married to a man commonly referred to as "Slick Willy" really doesn’t help her case on the second. It’s still too early to count her out completely, but it’s certainly not looking good for our old pal Hillary. Just like you remember in high school, elections often come down to simple likability. There’s a reason they call it the popular vote.
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