Sunday, February 24, 2008

We're Just Not That Into You

It cannot be easy to be Hillary Clinton these days. Gone is the (self-created) aura of invincibility. Now observers try to divine whether she is saying farewell in how she says she's soldiering on.

But here's an irony. Hillary lately has taken great, if now a fatalist's delight in mocking "Messiah" Obama. His followers, she suggests, have their heads in the clouds, their eyes rolling back, and their outstretched arms thrust heavenward. They chant "Yes, we can" with the first-time fervor of the politically naive and innocent. Wouldn't it be nice, she sarcastically says, if we could just "wave a magic wand" and we would all be united and all the lobbyists would "just disappear.?"

Personally, my own magic wand would magically make the Clintons at long last disappear, but that's beside the point.

By contrast, Hillary paints herself as the tough, pragmatic realist.

The irony is that many who support Obama over Clinton do so exactly out of a sense of the very same tough, pragmatic realism. It's simple: Clinton, by very dint of who she is, has zero chance of being a uniter. She would enter a Presidential race as Democratic nominee with the highest negatives of any candidate in modern history. She is, partly through no fault of her own, a living, ongoing, permanent target of enmity. That will not change.

Barack Obama comes in with none of that history. And that, for many voters, is the key to their support. A pragmatic, realistic calculation to support the Democratic candidate with the best chance of actually creating some rudimentary bipartisanship.

No magic wands required, Hillary. Nothing starry-eyed. Just some steely, stone-faced realism. Get it?

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