The Tao of Rocky
Apr 2nd, 2008 at 10:07 pm by Susie
All over the blogosphere today, bloggers (none of them actually born and raised in Philadelphia, which is relevant here) were referring to this:
In a speech in Philadelphia today, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, compared herself to Philly icon Rocky Balboa.
“Well, could you imagine if Rocky Balboa had gotten half way up those Art Museum steps and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s about far enough?’” Clinton asked.
“Let me tell you something, when it comes to finishing the fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common,” she will tell the Pennsylvania A.F.L.-C.I.O. audience. “I never quit. I never give up. And neither do the American people.”
Um….Senator?
Rocky lost.
Rocky lost. Oh, the laughter! Oh, the snark!
Of course, they missed the point. Of course they did.
To Philadelphians (and the thousands of “Rocky” fans who flock here every year), this movie isn’t about winning - it’s about class.
It’s about invisible people, living in forgotten, decaying neighborhoods. It’s about the search for dignity.
It’s about making people see your life.
At the beginning of the movie, Rocky’s a nobody, a neighborhood thug. By the end of the movie, he’s somebody people look up to. That was the trophy. That was the point of the whole damned movie.
It’s the hero’s mythic journey.
Some of the bloggers even said “Rocky 2″ was racist because it showed a white guy beating a black champion. You know what? I’d say “Rocky” is one of the few things in Philadelphia that cross color lines. Everyone loves Rocky.
Maybe I should rephrase that. The unhip people in Philadelphia love Rocky. To them, he’s the living, breathing embodiment of the city’s spirit. He’s a nobody who became a somebody, and maybe we can, too!
People all over the world get it. That’s why, no matter what time of the day or night, you see tourists in front of the Philadelphia Art Museum, running up the steps and leaping triumphantly at the top, or getting their pictures taken in front of the Rocky statue at the bottom.
The Clinton-bashers already have such a high opinion of their own self-worth, they can’t possibly understand Hillary Clinton’s appeal to the working class, or why “Rocky” resonates with her and her supporters. I’ll tell you why:
She sees them.
She sees them, and not like a particularly distasteful bug under a microscope, or as a bunch of bigots (as convenient as that might be for some to think).
This woman who has spent her entire life in public service connects with working people. Well, why wouldn’t she? They know life is hard and courage means to get up every day and keep trying.
Sometimes showing up is the only victory they’ll ever know.
They know college graduates look down on them. They know there’s a whole world out there they’ll never touch. They see those well-to-do people sometimes, in the expensive seats at the ballpark or on TV, but their lives don’t intersect much.
Hillary Clinton talks to them as if they matter, when they haven’t mattered for a very long time.
And of course the academic bloggers find this just a little… icky. They use their grad-school argument skills to ridicule the people who find hope in her. (Who are these pathetic people who will settle for mere dignity when they can have transcendence? Or the Unity Pony?)
When you have the luxury of living in a world of irony, there are some things you’ll just never get.
UPDATE: Lance Mannion gets it.
Well we live in a very rural, very poor area. Family income, even when averaged in with the relatively high forest ranger salaries, is quite low (we are a village in the middle of a national forest).
Sentiment here was about 70/30 pro Bush in 2000 and 2004. The grim reality of the Iraq war, inflation and the economy seem to have woken people up. I would hope that the democratic candidate adopts John Edwards message - if not the man himself to help in the campaign. He would be heard here.
Hey, Susie, you know I’ve admired your work for years. And I’m sorry I missed you at DFHacon. But remember that scene in Rocky where Rocky goes to Pittsburgh to tell far-right billionaire wingnut Richard Mellon Scaife that he wouldn’t have Apollo Creed’s pastor as his pastor?
I never liked that scene.
how did hillary clinton become the hero of the working class? i mean, she clearly is pandering in that direction (so is obama), but the reality is that she is not working class, that she’s always been very pro-corporate going back from even before her days on the board of walmart. obama’s not working class either, but i just find this image of clinton as champion of the working class to be pretty detached from reality.
To those from the creative class who want to stretch the allegory let’s go:
Apollo got his brains beat out by a White boxer and was avenged by Rocky.
So lemme see what you got.
ZUZU, I’ll do you one better…Apollo was a fighter, and won because he fought and beat people. He didn’t have them roll over for him to give him easy victories. Rocky was a loser but didn’t want to be one anymore so he just thought that if he could just not get knocked out he’d be ok with that. When he realized that he could actually have a chance at beating the champ, he fought like he had never fought before and the champ was fought like he’d never been fought before. Rocky lost the fight in the end, but was a loser no more. Fighting hard to earn something, a living, respect, a fair shot, resonates with folks who know what it’s like to give it their best and still fail. Anytime I see this movie I’m reminded that none of my friends (we’re all brothers) who also saw the movie wished that they were Apollo Creed instead of Rocky at the end.
Michael, I’m curious - did it bother you as much when Obama catered to the right-wing editorial board of the Las Vegas Sun by praising Reagan?
Hmmm, reading what Obama said about Reagan makes it quite obvious that Obama actually praised him significantly LESS than Clinton did in her book. He spoke about the nature of the times, the fact that Americans were looking for change, and said very little about the man’s policies. You are better than debating by using someone else’s talking points instead of actual facts. Sigh. This campaign has created very strange uses of traditional right wing tactics (on both sides). I will be glad when there is a nominee and we can get on with defeating McInsane. I personally will work for for any Democratic nominee in order to keep the Republicans from appointing any supreme court justices.
The Clinton-Rocky comparison disconnect that struck me most was the fact that Rocky came from out of nowhere and with nothing (or so little that he was essentially given no chance to win). Hillary came into this campaign with more money, way more super delegates, more name recognition, an incredible campaign machine ready to roll, the backing of the Democratic establishment and a husband who was supposedly he # 1 supporter and the greatest campaigner ever.
Clinton is close to losing after having it all and being well out in the lead. She is the anti-Rocky. People are well aware of this and it seems like a dumb move to start making comparisons that highlight this.
Touché. memyself. Touché.
I’m glad Hillary is addressing concerns of regular working folks, but this Rocky thing is kind of a loose fit, for all the reasons mentioned … and … Rocky didn’t go to Wellesly.
I didn’t like that scene which Michael Bérubé mentions either.
memyself has it exactly right. The Rocky comparison is ludicrous. Hillary Clinton is nothing like the Rocky you describe:
“To Philadelphians (and the thousands of “Rocky” fans who flock here every year), this movie isn’t about winning - it’s about class.
It’s about invisible people, living in forgotten, decaying neighborhoods. It’s about the search for dignity.
It’s about making people see your life.
At the beginning of the movie, Rocky’s a nobody, a neighborhood thug. By the end of the movie, he’s somebody people look up to. That was the trophy. That was the point of the whole damned movie.”
Hillary is the anti-Rocky. She had all the advantage and managed to squander it.
Thank you, Suzi.
Gawd, it’s nasty out here in the left wing blogosphere.
et tu, Bérubé?
I see the graduate students are out in force. Have some goat cheese, guys.
That was beautiful, Susie.
I like how the Rocky metaphor applies to the media circus too, all of them saying:
“He doesn’t know it’s a damn show! He thinks it’s a damn fight! “
Michael, I’m curious - did it bother you as much when Obama catered to the right-wing editorial board of the Las Vegas Sun by praising Reagan?
I watched that entire interview, actually. At the time. And here’s my take: what the Clinton camp was upset about wasn’t the Reagan bit, which wasn’t praise. Rather, they were upset, and understandably so, at the slam on the Clinton presidency, which wasn’t “transformative” in the way Reagan’s was.
But Obama was right on both counts. Reagan’s presidency completely redrew the political map. It tapped into anti-60s culture war backlash, consolidated the Southern Strategy, and rolled back a good chunk of the postwar welfare state. (See Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal, for a similar analysis of Thatcherism. And yep, sure enough, there were people back in the day who thought Hall was praising Thatcherism.) By contrast, the Clinton presidency amounted to playing defense on Republicans’ turf for eight years. It ceded a great deal of ground to the Reagan-Bush hegemonic bloc (as we say in the graduate seminars) and announced that the era of big government was over. Clinton blew the chance to move the Maginot Line of the welfare state from Social Security to a National Health Service (again, see Hall on Thatcher: that was the social program she couldn’t touch), and indeed ended “welfare as we know it” and signed the Defense of Marriage Act because Dick Morris told him to do it. There were progressive victories, like the earned income tax credit; and of course, one can’t forget that many of Clinton’s enemies on the right were evil and/or clinically insane. But Clintonism played on Reagan’s home court from the start, throwing gay servicemen and women (as well as Lani Guinier) under the bus the moment the GOP bared its teeth, and Obama was right to note it; likewise, the Clinton campaign, 2008 version, consists of playing an eleven-state strategy and hoping for a 2-out-of-3 in PA, OH, and FL. Like that worked out so well in 2000 and 2004.
I see the graduate students are out in force. Have some goat cheese, guys.
We call it chevre, thanks.
Roots in Scranton?
It seems those roots don’t run too deep, except as political expedients.
I don’t see her hanging in Scranton much lately; affluent Westchester is much nicer, less edgy. More graduate students there.
But Michael, that isn’t what I asked. I asked if Obama playing to a right-wing editorial board bothered you as much as Clinton’s talking to Scaife’s editorial board did. Because the thing that pisses me off the most about this primary is the ease at which so-called progressives slide back and forth between their double standards, and I’m asking if you’re consistent. I respect that in a blogger.
suzie,
before we became poor we didn’t see poor people. yes, we saw and carefully avoided some persons, but we didn’t see the inner workings of tanf and wic and … “welfare reform”, not as abstract wrongs, but as wicked things that harmed real people.
two days ago a bunch of people showed up at our camp, i could hear them at the common area and see their lawn chairs. a large group of rv people was my guess. when following jonah took me in that direction, and trips over there to load the washer, then the dryer, i saw and overheard enough to know they were all women, with anglos doing the big talking, but everyone else was bilingual spanish/english. it was a required wic class, and the anglo women were talking shopping to women who shop in supermercados, not supermarkets, and the anglo women required the non-anglos to perform in silly “games” that seemed as unworldly as lawn tennis to the problems of learning how to live on a frayed and knotted shoe string, with the help, and hindrance, of “reformed welfare”.
living poor in camps at towns where most are poor (ft. bragg california), and in towns were there is significant anglo-privilege and poverty (king city, lompoc, san diego) for two years has changed us, both abds, though not as much as raising two boys with autism has.
the bottom line is that we’re now aware that much of the democratic party is class-limited, and the bottom of the party, the low-end of its canvass and voter registration and gotv and … is well above where we had thought, and poverty is well below where we had thought.
in the ‘04 cycle i brow-beat kucinich until what he finally wrote at lessig’s, following dean’s non-memorable effort at using blogs, was real, the narrative of a guy who’d lived in cars. edwards gets it too.
i’m sorry to see the kind of discourse in several comments above. i don’t think your effort to use popular culture to explain the experience of poverty, of non-privilege, has been effective. we mostly share “pop culture”, what it brings to us, but we don’t share what we bring to it, and to everything else in life, including the privacy of the ballot box.
i thought you’d a splendid half hour of wicked good writing, a rare joy for most.
counted out in new hampshire, pow! she gets up off the mat. teddy endorses obama, clinton counters with a left jab, wins massachusetts and every other major state on super tuesday except missouri which she loses by a hair. she wins ohio and is leading in pennsylvania, in what political universe is obama even close to a front runner? neither have the pledged delegates or will have enough to win the nomination outright, yet obama keeps losing big states with no end in sight. it’s no wonder he wants it over but shame on all of you for buying it.
“in what political universe is obama even close to a front runner?”
The one where he’s won more delegates, more states, and more votes than Clinton has.
who is the best candidate? and not if you count michigan and florida and they will be counted
chris,
i know this is your blog (with susie) but more delegates, more states, and more votes simply isn’t a metric, its several.
the central thing about the great compromise, is that it was a compromise. the virgina plan (new york, california, …) would favor clinton, the new jersy plan (vermont, wyoming, …) would favor obama, so where, if anywhere, is there common ground?
i don’t think you need to be reminded how thin (and ephemeral) either candidate’s margins are for delegates, or for the popular vote, or that party rules do not in fact bind delegates even on the first ballot.
please stay sane. there is no metric which allows a conclusion that either of the hero twins are “front runners”. leave that ephemera to the “responsible media” who have to sell ad spacing content, aka “news”.
Different Chris, EB.
i don’t think you need to be reminded how thin (and ephemeral) either candidate’s margins are for delegates, or for the popular vote, or that party rules do not in fact bind delegates even on the first ballot.
the margin isn’t ephemeral at all. the bottom line is that clinton cannot realistically catch up in pledged delegates, and it is highly unlikely that she can catch up in the popular vote. she has to win not just every remaining race, but overwhelmingly in every remaining race, by a larger margin that she did in her home state of NY, to pull ahead. and that’s true even if you count the FL and MI votes. you can’t call such a solid lead in both pledged delegates and popular vote as “ephemeral”, it isn’t.
oh, and party rules do bind pledged delegates on their first vote. but that’s only a technicality. because there is no penalty for delegates who break their pledge, they can break the rules without fear of any sanction. but they are still breaking the rules.
in any case, it’s foolish to believe that pledged delegates would vote for a different candidate. pledged delegates are chosen because they are the true believers among the candidate’s supporters. they are the least likely to ever change their votes, that’s why the campaigns choose them to be delegates. if that’s what you mean by “emphemeral,” it’s not every realistic.
But Michael, that isn’t what I asked. I asked if Obama playing to a right-wing editorial board bothered you as much as Clinton’s talking to Scaife’s editorial board did
actually, i think prof berube did answer what you asked. or, at least, he noted that he did not accept the premise of your question. as he pointed out above the reagan comment was not “playing to a right-wing editorial board” he was stating something about reagan that was actually true. if you want to draw a parallel with the scaife meeting, you need to find one that actually works as a parallel, or convince him that your parallel makes more sense.
Funny, I see a perfect parallel: candidate A / candidate B speaks to a news organization on the other side politically, proclaims a truth that ingratiates him/her with said other side while also undermining his/her primary opponent. I don’t see how “He would not be my pastor.” could be any less true than “Republicans were the party of ideas for the last 10 or 15 years.”
I don’t think you’re doing professor Berube any favors by telling Susie she needs to rewrite (possibly in essay form?) her pithy follow-up, so that he can better understand her point.
Reagan and his ilk did bring new ideas to American politics. Obama stated a fact, but he also did not in ANY way intimate that these were GOOD ideas.
Unfortunately Hillary flat out lied about what he actually said and her version has somehow become the “truth” for a segment of the population.
http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/01/clintons_are_lying_about_obama.html
A lot of people felt Hillary’s “He would not be my pastor” was thoroughly disingenuous based on their own position that “He would not be my husband” was exactly what they felt strongly about Bill after the shit he put his wife and daughter through. A philandering lying cheater is bad enough, but to sit by while she went on television and defended him? No F*ing way I’d stay with a sleaze like that. So should we judge her on that as she would have us judge Obama?
I think any clinton connection to the “working class” will be rendered invisible once the tax returns surface…some estimates of hrc and the mister earning over $50 million since the end of his administration…are they paying taxes like the “working class” or like the “elite super rich class”? We know there are lots of ways the super rich avoid paying taxes…and all rich people work hard to find ways to minimize taxes…
The most revealing data point might be more “where” is the income flowing from?? who paid mr hrc for things and will some question were in an effort to garner favors in an hrc administration — or can something be tied (correctly or not) to a last minute mr hrc pardon??? The delay and resistance in releasing the tax returns are no accident or beaurocratic blip. $8 million a year average is nice swag for anyone not playing third base for the Yankees…and at the end of the day we all need to realize Rocky was just a movie…
A Friday night document release is predicted. Look to Josh Marshall and the crowd at Talking Points Memo to get a group document review done quickly and thoroughly.
You guys are funny. Obama lives in a $1.5 million historic mansion with a live-in housekeeper, Michelle Obama has a personal trainer and a $350K job - and all of this before they’re fifty years old.
Ten years ago, when the Clintons were their age, their 1998 federal income tax return shows $89,951 in Federal Income Tax on an Adjusted Gross Income of $504,109 - of which $200,000 was the President’s salary.
Sound to me like the Obamas are doing much better than the Clintons were at that age (not to mention of course the huge legal bills they piled up, courtesy of the Republicans.)
Oh, are you someone who walked away from a broken marriage? I rather admire people who forgive and move on.
” I asked if Obama playing to a right-wing editorial board bothered you as much as Clinton’s talking to Scaife’s editorial board did.”
The Vegas paper didn’t spend 8 years smearing Obama in a personal vendetta. Scaife threw every kind of base slander at the Clintons (murdering Vince Foster, etc), and bankrolled the obsessive efforts to dig up dirt in Arkansas.
There’s simply no comparison.
When the Clintons are getting chummy with Scaife, the touchiness over Monica Lewinsky seems misplaced - without Scaife, there probably wouldn’t have been a Monica Lewinsky scandal.
Heck, at the rate the Clintons are making allies of their former demonizers, it’s only a matter of time before the Clintons seek the endorsements of Monica, Linda Tripp, and Ken Starr.
” (not to mention of course the huge legal bills they piled up, courtesy of the Republicans.)”
Courtesy of Scaife.
yes, OB is wealthy and you know all about his income because he lets everyone see it - i am sure if OB’s income was from a questionable source hrc would have been pearl-clutching long ago…and so what if he is making more than they were at his age? a cheap fall-back tactic typical of hrc is to get people to look somewhere else…I don’t blame or think badly of anyone making great money…but it will be interesting to see what is released and what isn’t…I hope nothing bad is there - honestly! Just another GOP smear in the waiting (not to say more fuel for the never-ending victim meme of the big boys picking on her…) but the insane money paid to ex-presidents for speaking tours etc is never good press nor will seeing where $ for the library and foundation are coming from and some backchannel stink-test failures always seem to follow the clinton family around (warranted or not…).
I happen to think if hrc would talk abt why she has stayed in her marriage etc would be a GREAT thing. She excels in opportunities to discuss feelings, choices and loyality. I think a lot of people have chosen to stay in a marriage/relationship and give 2nd/3rd/4th chances that would see her as a “common person” then and relate better to her. I know I would if it really was genuine… plus it would work well against the certain swell of questions likely to come from the tax returns…a lot of people are convinced she stayed married because of the wanting to keep the link to power (true or not) and addressing it to some degree would be advantageous, imo…
I don’t see Obama’s money as sqeaky clean but that’s the touchy subject of Rezko. Forget about the wife being on the historic commissions committee, so she could arrange to have the lot split in two. That could happen to relatively ordinary people. But then how many people know a guy (Rezko) who know a guy (Auchi, an Iraqi billionaire) who can lend Mrs. Rezko $700,000 (because for some reason I don’t know the money couldn’t go to Mr. Rezko) so that Mrs. Rezko could buy the lot on the same day as the Obamas buy their house, which was necessary for the deal to happen at all. Would you do that if you knew a guy who knew a guy who could do that, and would it depend on how much you wanted the house?
I will never understand the feeling expressed by some about Hillary not being a feminist (or some such sentiment) because she didn’t divorce Bill over adultery. People stay together even when they feel publicly humiliated, even when they think the neighbors and their friends all know (which they do). See the movie “One True Thing” for a moving explanation. And it’s nothing like Pastor Wright because millions of people have personal experience with adultery.
I love how people give Clinton trouble for talking to Scaife. If she was o.k. with it, what business is it of theirs? Which media outlets should Clinton talk to? The ones calling for her to quit every day? Obama supporters have the gall to think they can set the rules of a presidential campaign. The thing they fail to realize is Clinton knows she’s not getting their vote. She knows you’re not happy she spoke with Scaife. She, rightly, doesn’t care. You’re not her demographic. So, enough with the concern trolling.
How come Obama wouldn’t speak with The Philly Gay News?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080403/ap_on_el_pr/clinton_gay_rights
the Wright issue has been vetted and even Mcain gave OB shelter from it (along the lines of Huckabee)…hrc supporters won’t let go of it since they see it as the one thing that caused OB’s momentum to slow…I expect lots of attempts to distract and look somewhere else to gather steam as the the PA polls tighten and tax returns get a close look…
You know, Joe, Clinton talked all about her reasons for staying with her husband in her autobiography. If you really want to know, you could read it.
I’m sorry, are people who belong to the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy, and John Edwards actually making the argument that because she’s rich Hillary Clinton can’t have any real connection with or concern for working people?
Lance: I certainly agree personal wealth has no connection to how you will govern. Reagan was a son of the working class; FDR was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
Now let’s talk substance. Sen. Clinton recently discovered some problems with NAFTA; she voted for the bankruptcy bill; she voted for AUMF and has consistently stood by that vote (and there is an economic dimension to that - not too many sons and daughters of elite families are dying in the sand.) On real, substantive economic issues Sen. Clinton has sided with the moneyed interests at the expense of working stiffs. In Democratic primaries she’s trying to talk a good fight but her actual record sure doesn’t look progressive from where I sit. It is perfectly reasonable to look at her actual record and question just how much the issues of non-elites truly resonate within her.
So you don’t think fighting for universal health care was progressive? Because that’s the kind of thing working families worry about.
But Michael, that isn’t what I asked. I asked if Obama playing to a right-wing editorial board bothered you as much as Clinton’s talking to Scaife’s editorial board did. Because the thing that pisses me off the most about this primary is the ease at which so-called progressives slide back and forth between their double standards, and I’m asking if you’re consistent. I respect that in a blogger.
Well, Susie, I just don’t buy the analogy at all– partly for the reason JonH offered in # 31, and partly because I don’t believe Obama played to a right-wing editorial board in the way you suggest (he lit into Reagan’s actual policies later in the interview, btw). But to answer your question about whether I have the same standards for Obama and Clinton: yes indeed. I never liked Obama’s concern-troll worrying about Social Security, and I was mightily pissed off by the Donnie McClurkin episode. Those two things kept me from supporting Obama until it came down to a two-person race.
Since January, I think Clinton has run one of the most foolish and destructive campaigns since Ulysses Grant ran in 1868 on the slogan, “If elected I promise to drink myself into a coma.” For all the Obama camp’s faults (and they do overreact, as when they claimed that the Clinton people released the Somali-garb picture), they have not made the outrageous claim that Obama and McCain have passed some “commander-in-chief” test. Any reasonable Democrat — man, woman, other, black, green, red, or purple — should have been stunned by that move. As I pointed out last month, it’s actually unprecedented. And it was needless: there was no reason whatsoever for Clinton to run on the claim that her national-security cred was greater than Obama’s (we trusted her mainly for her domestic policies, which are good, and not for her votes on Iraq and Kyl-Lieberman, which were bad), and that foolish decision led her into the Bosnia “misspeaking” debacle. Why? All to attack (and deflect from) the fact that Obama was right about the war in 2002 and Clinton was wrong. Or, as Hillary-Rocky put it, “I think that I have a lifetime of experience that I will bring to the White House. Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech that he gave in 2002.”
I just don’t see anything admirable in Clinton’s tactics here. And I am genuinely surprised by them.
Susie:
Fighting badly for universal health care is progressive. It’s also useless.
Who do you think, way down deep inside, had the more progressive view of African-Americans; JFK, the northern liberal, or LBJ, the Texas good ole’ boy? JFK, the northern liberal was useless - no progress made whatsoever under him. And racist good ole boy LBJ? Nothing less than the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the single most important piece of legislation having to do with racial equality since the 13th amendment. Outcomes are what matter. I believe in his heart and his brain Jimmy Carter had a beautiful vision for this country. I also know his inability to realize that vision paved the way for Reagan. Intentions without political acumen don’t mean a thing.
Look at what Hilary Clinton has been on the winning side of versus what she’s been on the losing side of. Yes, she had a chance (a rare chance I might add - polls showed a pronounced nation-wide shift in favor of some form of universal coverage in the early 90’s) when she was appointed to head the Health Care Task Force. Frankly, if you wanted to write a “How Not To” guide for creating legislation you would need do nothing more than explain how she handled the task. And her failure – and I am not blaming her alone – but her failure and how she failed set back the cause so completely that here we are 15 years later still having the same old discussion.
And I know, Newt Gringrich is a bad guy and Republicans fought her every step of the way. So – you think Republicans won’t fight any Democratic president? Furthermore, as I’ve pointed out here before, had she succeeded she would certainly be using that success as the centerpiece of her run for the White House and you would do the same here. And you’d both be right to do so. The problem is you are trying to have it both ways; if she succeeds she gets the credit; if she fails it’s somebody’s else’s fault.
And what has Sen. Clinton been on the winning side of? The War in Iraq, the Bankruptcy Bill (one of the most onerous pieces of legislation ever shoved down the throats of the working class), the Patriot Act, AUMF…….
Michael, there’s no question that was a mistake. But I don’t think she was seriously saying Obama wasn’t better than McCain - she was just giving in to the all-too-human impulse to take a cheap, sarcastic shot. It was nasty and inappropriate, but we all have those moments and she is, after all, under some stress.
What I don’t understand is how Democrats so readily accepted the Obama-generated strategic narrative that successfully painted Bill and Hillary Clinton, of all people, as racists. Masterful swiftboating tactic, though - one I recognize (since I worked for his communications consultants). They accomplished what they set out to do, and no one who’s worked a major campaign will confuse it with an accident.
To me, that was really quite cynical and awful - and much, much worse than the McCain remark. MUCH worse. If Clinton is the nominee, that poisoned her support in the AA community. Talk about double standards! This kind of thing should be rejected by all Democrats, not just the ones supporting Clinton.
Imagine, Bill and Hillary are now Klansmen. The mind boggles.
“What I don’t understand is how Democrats so readily accepted the Obama-generated strategic narrative that successfully painted Bill and Hillary Clinton, of all people, as racists.”
Democrats didn’t.
Majorities of Democrats support Hillary, because they never bought that shit pie. I know a 21-year-old first-time voter, though, who is caught up in the excitement of sticking it to his elders, and he definitely believes it.
Michael, there’s no question that was a mistake. But I don’t think she was seriously saying Obama wasn’t better than McCain - she was just giving in to the all-too-human impulse to take a cheap, sarcastic shot. It was nasty and inappropriate, but we all have those moments and she is, after all, under some stress.
I thought so too, at first, and I gave her a pass the first couple of times she said it. Then it turned out that it was her new post-TX/ OH strategy, one that she actually repeated all week long in different forms. And that’s when I started getting upset with the tenor of her campaign.
What I don’t understand is how Democrats so readily accepted the Obama-generated strategic narrative that successfully painted Bill and Hillary Clinton, of all people, as racists.
I don’t think too many people believe this, actually. (A), I don’t believe the Sean Wilentz line that the Obama camp has been race-baiting all along, and (B) I don’t think very many people see the Clintons as racists. At least, I hope not. I agree, though, that Clinton’s remark in January about LBJ (the bit about needing a president to make the civil rights movement into law) was completely legit, and that no one should have read a slight to MLK into it; and I agree that Orlando Patterson’s claim that the 3 a.m. ad was racist was, how you say, loony-tunes. This whole overreaction aspect of the race (and it’s a big aspect, especially among us low-level political junkies) depresses me no end, because I personally couldn’t care whether Obama was black, white, purple or green, and I agree that Hillary has endured some truly vile sexist nonsense from the moment she stepped into the public sphere.
Hillary is nothing like Rocky.
Rocky was working class and was all about integrity and guts.
Ok, I will give her guts all right, … in fact this woman has balls.
But Rocky wouldn’t have stood up and lied about how he dodged sniper bullets to impress people, and then later said, “oops, I was tired, I say a lot of things, I ‘mispoke’”.
I am afraid integrity and Hillary Clinton do not go together.
Lance Mannion writes:
I’m sorry, are people who belong to the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Bobby Kennedy, and John Edwards actually making the argument that because she’s rich Hillary Clinton can’t have any real connection with or concern for working people?
Dead thread I know, but actually Susie’s post here is simply saying that Barack Obama can’t have any real connection or concern for working people. (See, unlike Clinton, he hasn’t spent his entire life in public service.) So it all makes sense.