Damn that Frank Rich! Always taking the words right out of my mouth. Well, he's a damn good writer, which is I guess why he works for The New York Times. To wit, he brings up in his piece entitled "The Audacity of Hopelessness" darn good points about the smoke and mirrors lore of Hillary's alleged "experience" in getting things done, which has become about as effective in her political campaign as it was for her failed attempt at health care reform:
This is the candidate who keeps telling us she's so competent that she'll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin resume;, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker resume; is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.
Ouch. And finally, someone in the mainstream press is calling her out on the cheap ways she constrasts herself to Obama:
Clinton fans don't see their standard-bearer's troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naive young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones's Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.
But it's the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it's a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate's message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.
Thank you. And the sheer negativity and callousness with which they obviously consider this whole "getting elected" affair a big political game, or a scorched-earth battle should be widely read as deeply insulting, but they're getting away with it:
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and -- talk about bizarre -- against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
Bill Clinton knocked states that hold caucuses instead of primaries because "they disproportionately favor upper-income voters" who "don't really need a president but feel like they need a change." After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn't won in "any of the significant states" outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zuniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the "insult 40 states" strategy.
What's up with that? Basically, as they lose states, Billary is saying, "Oh, well, they're not really the Americans we're worried about, anyway. Fuck 'em." In a nutshell. And even while getting away with murder on the campaign trail, Billary complains of getting beaten up by the press:
If the press were as prejudiced against Mrs. Clinton as her campaign constantly whines, debate moderators would have pushed for the Clinton tax returns and the full list of Clinton foundation donors to be made public with the same vigor it devoted to Mr. Obama's "plagiarism." And it would have showered her with the same ridicule that Rudy Giuliani received in his endgame. With 11 straight losses in nominating contests, Mrs. Clinton has now nearly doubled the Giuliani losing streak (six) by the time he reached his Florida graveyard. But we gamely pay lip service to the illusion that she can erect one more firewall.
Right on the money. What is all this vaunted experience getting her? What has Billary demonstrated in this race other than utter and supreme arrogance, disregard for entire swathes of the American voting populace, and that, for all her talk of "experience," she's being trumped by a man and a campaign with their nose to the grindstone, finger on the pulse of the people, and feet on the ground campaigning, from the grassroots to the big networks.
That's something Obama learned how to do, that's a skill he did pick up while organizing, administrating, and governing back in Chicago -- so when are we going to stop cutting Hillary this ludicrously extreme slack and tell her, once and for all, to put up or pack it up?
Truly an apropos title for his HIllary hit piece: "The Audacity of Hopelessness." Yeah, Billary has been pretty fucking audacious, at that.
