Wednesday, February 06, 2008 - Posts
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That is a dandy plan if you don't want any of those bad, evil Republicans to vote for you in the fall. (And sure they still hate her; I think the clinical term is playing possum.)
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An ancient Egyptian charm:
Oh, Isis, deliver me from the hands of all bad, evil, red things!
Maybe Hillary hopes this is what Republicans are chanting at the moment. (See Maureen Dowd's column this morning on Hillary selling herself as the only one who has experience beating back the evil Republican forces, as opposed to "Obambi.")
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Meghan, about your momentum question, I've been thinking about it this way: Does Obama have enough momentum to continue gaining? Since Hillary expected to sew it up on Super Tuesday a political lifetime ago, that seems like a fair framing. The best answer I saw today came from Noam Scheiber at TNR, in a post that David Plotz sent around to us at Slate. The upcoming contests over the next couple of weeks are either caucuses (Nebraska, Washington state, Maine), which have favored Obama, or have demographics that favor Obama (Louisiana, Maryland, D.C., Virginia). Then, in the beginning of March, the race will shift to Ohio and Texas, where Hillary has been ahead. If Obama has indeed won most of the intervening contests, that will be the big mo test.
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Michelle Obama is no Nancy Reagan, either, and I think maybe all of these women are just trying to "pop'' on TV. But—shameless forced transition alert—whatever shade we're in the market for ... doesn't it seem like the phrase "shop until you drop'' is taking on an ominous new meaning? Seriously, we've become so used to this level of violence that it barely registers, but just last Saturday, five women were shot to death in a Lane Bryant store in a Chicago suburb. The very next day, three men were killed in what the AP described as a "dining, shopping and entertainment complex'' in Largo, Md. That follows the December tragedy in which a 19-year-old took down eight others before fatally shooting himself at a mall in Omaha, Neb. Not to be confused with the time earlier in the year when another teenager murdered five people at a mall in Salt Lake City. So my question is, at what point does our patriotic duty to shop run up against our God-given right to pack a semiautomatic? And as long as we're still mulling our presidential options, is any candidate out there ever going to have a single word to say about gun control?
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All this talk about First Ladies wearing red got me thinking about My So Called Life. In one of the first episodes, the dad character says he thinks Hillary Clinton doesn't wear enough red. That was a "thing" during the '90s, wasn't it--I mean people complaining about Hillary's color palatte? As Dana suggests, maybe the red complaint was shorthand for "she's no Nancy Reagan."
So what does it mean that Hillary wears more red now (at the State of the Union, for example) than she ever did as first lady? I buy that Michelle Obama's trying to evoke Nancy, but surely Hillary's going for something else, right? I think it makes her look tough and bold. The color doesn't evoke submission.
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Hanna, I had the same question about whether there was a secret Neiman Marcus store available for political women after watching the State of the Union speech: That night, all the Washington ladies--including Hillary, no aspiring first lady there--were wearing the same shade of fire-engine red. I'm sure part of the point is to help the camera find you. But it looked like the doings of a sly Oscar Wildean fashion consultant, slumming around behind their backs and telling each one of them, "You should really wear more red." (Melinda, how much do you know about your red-counseling astrologer?)
On the speeches last night: I actually thought neither Hillary nor Barack was at their best, but it almost didn't matter, since there was just so much energy in the rooms around them. Meanwhile, since I'm alone out here in Texas, I'm dying to know what my fellow XXFactorites (XXFactorettes? Yikes!) make of the narrative of Obama and "momentum." The conventional wisdom last night on CNN and NPR was that Obama could win in two ways: one, by accumulating enough sheer delegate-count and, more likely, 2) by gaining enough "momentum." Today's conventional wisdom seems to be split on whether last night offered a display of Obama "momentum" or not. Kevin Drum thinks not. I, frankly, can't tell.
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I feel sort of sorry for the Republicans today as they face the end of their interlude of disarray. And I can't share the editorialists' dour view of the bruising fight ahead for the Democrats, whose race is still so unsettled. Here's to continued dithering! Like Meghan yesterday, writing from Texas, and Anne from Poland, what I'm fascinated by, and totally in step with, is the mood of indecision and unpredictability. Lots of people headed into the voting booth not sure which way they'd go: That's what I heard, too, from family and friends in the Northeast. And it's not just mushy Democrats who are still wavering, but evangelicals as well, hardly your waffling type. Take a look at the astonishing Barna Group study Hanna cited yesterday, and what's really striking is that so many evangelicals--the subset of born-again Christians who are really conservative (believe that everything the Bible asserts is true, that God is perfect and all-knowing, etc.)--haven't made up their minds, either: "a whopping 40%," as the study puts it, are still undecided (with 45 percent ready to support the Republican nominee, and 11 percent the Democratic contender). And this from a voting bloc that has until now seemed made of granite: 85 percent of evangelicals voted Republican in 2004. So many ditherers on all sides don't seem to add up to an embattled nation, entrenched in polarized camps. We're baffling the pollsters. Who knows, maybe we can surprise ourselves, too.
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Hanna, you raise an interesting point about Hillary hatred. Now that she's won millions of votes all across the country, is Hillary hatred actually a phantom? Or is it bubbling below the surface, ready to blow in the fall like a wildcat well in There Will Be Blood? All the Republican commentators I saw last night said they fervently hope Hillary, not Obama, is the nominee against McCain. This article lays out the oft-heard argument that Hillary hatred will send moderates and independents rushing to McCain (could it all be Republican disinformation because they know everyone secretly loves Hillary?). When the whole Clinton family gathered onstage before Hillary's speech, I had that feeling I now get whenever I see Bill ("Go away, please, go away!"). Is that what Republicans are hoping will rise up in the fall if Hillary's the nominee? I thought both Hillary and Obama gave pedestrian speeches—which is better for her. Supposedly she gave a rousing address at her college commencement, magic she's been unable to capture ever since. We expect so much uplift from him that when he sounds a little off, it's a letdown.
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Dahlia, you got that right: Putting prospective first ladies in red suits is a none-too-subtle code meant to evoke the administration that's currently back in nostalgic vogue. Nancy Reagan wore the color so often (usually in that same fire-engine shade we saw last night) that it came to be called "Reagan red." Last year, Mrs. Reagan took Laura Bush on a tour of an exhibit of red dresses at the Reagan Library. To wear it is to quote her as unambiguously as McCain evoked the Reagan/Stallone '80s by marching onstage to the Rocky theme for his victory speech. Michelle Obama's donning of the hue is more complex. Obviously, this choice is supposed to recall the general optimism of the morning-in-America days. But is it also meant to reassure us that Michelle, who only last year left her high-powered job as an executive at the University of Chicago hospitals, will remain safely on the Nancy-esque sidelines when her husband becomes president, confining her role to charity work like the cleft-palate foundation whose board Cindy McCain serves on (and through which she adopted their now-16-year-old daughter from Bangladesh)? At any rate, the color-coded association of both women with the ultimate loyal-but-silent political spouse clearly serves to distance them from a certain prospective first husband who doesn't need to wear loud colors to get himself noticed.
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Hanna, Melinda, aren’t all those red power suits just girl-code for Nancy Reagan? As in my-husband-is-just-like-Ronnie-red?
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Well, devil temptress, thy name is Hanna, but I am standing my ground on Cindy McCain; well-exfoliated, yes, but love the upsweep. As for the color red, maybe it's on my mind because I recently had my once-a-decade consult with my friendly neighborhood (purple-haired, feminist) astrologer, whose VW is wearing one of my all-time favorite bumper stickers: "Isis, Isis, Rah, Rah, Rah!'' (The last time I went, in 1995, she correctly predicted what day I was going to conceive twins, so until lately I'd been scared to go back.) And you know what wisdom she had for me this time? "What are you, in the witness relocation program?'' she wanted to know. "You should wear more red.''
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As it happens, Dahlia, I watched all the candidates' speeches early this morning, (thank you, CNN International) and I thought Hillary's performance was notably worse than the others. She was the only one who seemed to be reading from notes, the only one who looked down at the podium more than out at the audience, the only one whose cliches grated. Everyone else seemed to be speaking more or less spontaneously. McCain was relaxed; Huckabee was funny; Romney was grim; Obama was inspirational; only Hillary seemed utterly humorless, completely emotion-free, and not even especially happy. Her rhetoric may sound good on paper, but she is incapable of delivering it in a way that seems convincing. This is not a remotely original observation, but it somehow seemed particularly stark last night.
Maybe this year she's unlucky with her competition: If she was up against notably poor public speakers like George W. Bush (or even George H.W. Bush) it might not matter, but if you listen to her right after hearing Huckabee, as I did—and I do not speak here as a potential Huckabee voter—she just sounds stiff and phony. Doesn't she have advisors who can get on top of this? It seems strange.
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I agree with all but No. 4. Michelle Obama looks good in anything, and Cindy McCain looks scary in everything. Also, is there some rule that says all potential first ladies have to wear red? I don't think I've ever seen a red suit in a store. Is there some special, secret VIP section of Neiman Marcus that sells only red? And now, to be really catty, when did all political women start to get Botoxed?
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Every year for Lent, I give up speaking ill of anyone. It is a long 40 days, and it begins today. (I mention this so that if it seems like I've had my brain removed, no, I haven't, and I will be back to my old critical self before you can say mortification of the flesh.) But in the humble spirit of the season, what did we learn from Super Fat Tuesday?
1) Change is good: The single most unambiguous piece of information to come out of last night is that Democrats see the promise of change as way more important than the value of experience—52 percent to 23 percent said it was the No. 1 thing they were looking for in a candidate. And since in '08 shorthand Obama equals change and Clinton equals experience, this can only be good news for him; the candidate who wins the argument about what the election is over generally wins the election. (Only "generally'' may no longer apply, which leads us to our second lesson.)
2) Polls are caca, and all the rules have been suspended. Even more than has been generally acknowledged, this race is so fluid and voters so volatile that pollsters can't seem to keep up, and known patterns seem not to apply. The good in this is that it challenges some of our laziest assumptions and silliest stereotypes like ...
3) Conservatives are sheep who go bah, bah, bah all the way home. Not true, and I don't think it's so much that conservative talk radio has lost its influence as that it never had the authority to issue edicts in the first place; when Rush and Laura and Sean reflect conservative opinion, they do magnify it, but when they don't, voters seem to have no trouble dissenting.
4) Women across the ideological spectrum look great in red. Nah, scratch that one; Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama look good in anything. And on that positive note, one day down, 39 to go.
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Here's what's confusing me about last night's results. I have been operating under the assumption that vast swaths of red America hate Hillary. But she won in Tennessee and Oklahoma. She won among less-educated white men. She cleaned up with women. That, combined with that Barna study I cited yesterday saying born-agains prefer Hillary to all other candidates. Is Hillary hatred no more?
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