Why does no one pander to me?

You know, Hillary Clinton's probably going to win this thing. It doesn't even matter what happens in North Carolina or Indiana today. Like the lower half of her pantsuits, her campaign is finally approaching critical mass. The woman from Wellesley has morphed into the Okie from Muskogee. She's schmoozing losers in greasy diners. She's bellowing from the backs of pickup trucks. She'd be chewing tobacco and driving a mule if she thought it would get three more votes in Lincoln County. Obama, on the other hand, is starting to look like a seventh-grade civics teacher, weary of explaining to dim adolescents why the government can't make people richer by printing more money.

Memo to Obama: See what is possible when you shrug off the tiresome rules of physics? You can promise all things to all people without shame. Your strength becomes greater than 10 CNN analysts. Your hair regains its youthful luster. Your sense of direction becomes exquisite: It coincides precisely with the way the wind is blowing.

Not that I'm for or against shameless pandering. I just wish both candidates would pander more to me, personally: a newly unemployed person who would prefer not to tell pollsters that he watches American Idol and owns a pit bull. I don't eat in crappy diners and I never saw anyone shouting in the back of a pickup who wasn't involved in a fistfight later that night. I've never drawn unemployment, but I wouldn't mind getting some money in the mail. My house was affordable and my payments aren't bad, but hey: if you can make them go away, I'm all for it. And as long as you're promising cheaper gas, why not make it free? Throw me a bone here. If you can't change my life in meaningful ways, at least extend the courtesy of an empty promise.

Actually, I have the TV on now and it appears that Hillary has just promised all of the above. Alrighty then. Eighteen months ago I bet a coworker dinner that however the Democratic race ended up, Obama would finish ahead of Clinton. I see I shall now have to renege. Obama may talk about change, but Hillary talks about pocket change. Dave's Fiction Warehouse now projects that she's winning it all.

And don't talk to me about superdelegates. Yeah, Obama may still have the lead. But the rest know that if they don't play along, one morning they'll get out of a nice hot shower and open up the medicine cabinet, and when they close it there will be Hillary in the mirror, smiling unpleasantly. "Remember me? Losers lose, friend-o." That's one campaign promise she'll definitely keep.

Comments

seenos said…
But Hillary can't win now. Harold Ford just admitted that the most important thing Barack Obama needs to do is increase his appeal with rural, working class, Americans . . . by offering Hillary the VP slot!

Personally, I only think he should consider such a move if he can't get Larry the Cable Guy!
May 6, 2008 at 9:27 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sleuths are only as good as their sidekicks

Image
I recently read the much-lauded Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands , by French author Fred Vargas, and like many others found it quirky and engaging. Her deft writing left me happy to have found another series character to follow: Commissaire Adamsberg. But that's not what this post is about. I've decided that others do a lot better job with reviews than I do, and I hate laboring over my shallow insights only to find later that I've echoed what everybody else said a long time before. (And yes, I can hear you saying: "But that's never stopped you before." True enough. Nor will it now.) So, short version: Wash This Blood is a good book. Buy it. But for all the talk about it being "eccentric" or even "kooky," it does share one key device with nearly all other detective fiction: the sidekick. Adamsberg's reliance on gut instinct and intuition is sharply defined by the hard-nosed, scientific approach of his second in command, Capitaine
Read more

A farewell to copy

Image
On Friday I walked out of a newspaper building as an employee for the last time. During the stroll to the far end of the parking lot, I did a brief review of my career. Here's the high point: I've worked at newspapers that have won Pulitzer prizes. And the low point: None of those Pulitzers were won while I was working at the newspapers in question. Hey, I'm sure that's just bad timing. Of the half dozen papers I worked for, the best was the Philadelphia Inquirer. The worst was the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont. When you enter the cavernous newsroom of the Inquirer, you pass by a wall festooned with pictures of reporters and editors who have won Pulitzers. It is a measure of my love of journalism that when I looked at these pictures, I usually reflected not on the prize-winning stories they reported, but on the clothes they were wearing. Look at them: All these gifted journalists, photographed at the very apex of their careers, and most of them are dressed like t
Read more

Wall Street and Willa Cather

Image
I've been reading My Antonia , Willa Cather's 1918 novel about growing up on the Nebraska prairie. It's a beautiful book, poignant and uplifting, full of characters who reflect the truth of life in all its joy and pain. It's also an instructive portrait of the time in America when explicit toil was required for mere survival, never mind success. I've been reading it against the background noise of Wall Street's collapse, men and women on CNN droning gravely about the consequences of greed, and the need to ensure that the greediest of all do not, in the end, go broke. It's a complex issue. It takes someone like Yale business student David Bledin, writing an op-ed for the Washington Post, to put a human face on the unfolding tragedy. You think you have it tough; think what it's like for Masters of the Universe-in-training who now rue the rigors involved in chasing a seven-figure salary: "... once I could afford to splurge on a Zagat-rated "$$$
Read more