Is electing Hillary the sincerest form of flattery?Follow

I ask this because for all the protestations otherwise I'm certain to hear, it seems to me that the argument can be made that electing the Hellbeast is the Democratic Party's version of pushing Dubya on the nation. Face it, each of you Bush haters has claimed that he is far less a president than his father ever was, he has committed all sorts of sordid acts, and is a dismal failure at being our nation's top elected official.

I submit to you that putting Hillary is the very same action, just via a different party. Both would ostensibly be the follow-on to a previous successful family member who held the office, both ostensibly made/make the claim to have the credentials for the highest office in the land.

As Slate magazine has said so eloquently, why would we ever bother to vote for Hillary? http://www.slate.com/id/2182065 The return to the ills of a former adminstration, only more ineptly-- ring a bell, all you ABBers?

Totem

Absolutely. Raise your hand, readers, if you have ever uttered the words, "Worst. President. Evah." C'mon, 'fess up. You know you've said/thought that or worse. So, by extension, Dubya is a far worse president that his father. C follows, B, which follows A.

Totem

Not really being a hillary fan, I can't argue much.

So according to your theory is FDR the failed successor to to the Roosevelt name? Or does that not count because they were in opposing parties?

After her presidency the country will be begging for totalitarianism.

fUck that.

I like my guns.

hillary or cobra commander?

http://www.ruthlessreviews.com/reviews.cfm/id/1451/page/hillary_or_cobra_commander_.html

I hate the cut-n-paste of this post, but this is an interesting read on the Hellbeast from a female admirer/writer on Slate:

It’s not going to be about gender when the pundits turn Barack Obama’s thrashing of Hillary Clinton in South Carolina into a referendum on her husband. The truth is that long before Bill turned himself into the Tasmanian Devil on the campaign trail, we were wondering how Hillary was going to fit in the space around him.

Long before his extra-credit sessions with his female staffers, Hillary suffered the comparison between his megawatt charisma and effortless authenticity -- even when he was lying, he was genuine. Long before he re-emerged, larger than life, in South Carolina, he was always larger than her.

As women, we always knew Hillary would have a rough time getting beyond being the missus, and we hardly telegraphed clear messages about what we’d have liked to see from her. We blamed her for staying with him, and we loved her for it. We blamed her for skidding along on his coattails, but we understood that sometimes that's the only way to get in the game. A friend once suggested that women who hate Hillary mostly just wanted to get in Bill’s Wranglers. Any way you look at it, the man casts an enormous shadow; and any way you look at it, we knew too much about the balance of power in their relationship to be comfortable.

Perhaps as a result of Bill’s giant shadow, Hillary wants it both ways. She wants to be on his team and to make it on her own. She wants credit for her successes and credit for his. She wanted him on the sidelines in this campaign until she needed a soccer hooligan. And as soon as he began to co-opt her presidential bid in earnest this week, our first serious female contender for president started to look like Bill’s wife again.

One of the qualities in Hillary Clinton that scares me most is her lack of a fixed sense of self. She has invented and re-invented her public persona dozens of times over the years -- often to contrast with Bill's -- and you can’t really blame her for that. She’s had to figure out what this country wants from its women as she goes along, and if this campaign has revealed anything it’s that we no more agree on what we want in our women than we agree on how to get out of Iraq.

But it hasn’t helped that this Clinton campaign has also reinvented itself almost weekly since January: We’ve had Falling to Pieces Week; Finding Our Voice Week; Unloading a Carton of Whupass Week; and then Heh, Heh, That Bill Is a Maniac Week. Is it just me, or is it true that when it comes to issues of character, you don’t necessarily want a candidate who seems to be testing out new ones for each new crisis?

Caroline Kennedy will be endorsing Obama in tomorrow’s New York Times, and you can’t miss the contrast between this daughter of a great president and the wife of one. Feminists may weep that Kennedy speaks from under the shadow of her father to endorse another man, while Hillary can’t seem to wriggle out from the shadow of her husband. But then, it’s not an accident that in South Carolina tonight, Obama beat Clinton among women 53 percent to 30 percent.

It’s not so much that women aren’t ready for a woman president. We are. But there’s something about last week’s spectacle of Bill Clinton crashing through South Carolina like the guy poised to drag her back to his cave by the hair that reminds us that Hillary has some stuff to work out in her marriage before she works it out with the rest of us. Any woman in public life inevitably still struggles to define herself in opposition to men. But Hillary has an even bigger cross to bear: She’s still defining herself in opposition to Bill.

This ambivilence is what will eventually kill in either the convention or the general election. Ultimately, she appears weak, especially in comparison to a satyritic and charismatic Bill or a optimistic and charismatic Obama.

Totem

I'm with you. Not a big fan of the same old same old over and over. If Hillary is elected who will win the next election? One of the Bush daughters? It's like a flippin aristocracy.

Dude, that was so lame...

Not being involved in politics and the voting process, I'm rather concerned by this race. Considering that all of our presidents have been rich old white men it seems rather odd that the two frontrunners are a woman and a black man. I don't think that, as a country, we are really all that progressive. This feels like a big freakshow to me; it's like yet another reality show. Maybe it's just fear that the skirts and the darkies really have gotten so much clout.

I thought Caroline Kennedy already endorsed Clinton?

*Edit* Ahhh, my mistake. That was Kathleen Kennedy (Townsend).

Edited, Jan 29th 2008 10:58am by Kakar

That's like getting an endorsement from George while your opponent has John & Paul.

What can we say? If it were possible, we'd elect Prince Charles to lifetime President if we could. And Britney would be his First Lady.

Totem