Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 847 Editor's Choice: 9
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Aint nothing but a hound dog.
[Read the article: Americans more ready for a black president than a woman?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]That Bill Clinton is an admitted adulterer is a well established fact, not a Republican talking point.
That it bears a direct impact on Senator Clinton's campaign is highly debatable. The impact is tertiary or parenthetical at best, as it were.
The issue is whether or not, in a general election, the voters of America will vote for Hillary Clinton or John McCain.
For most of us on salon.com, the choice is as clear as crystal: clearly, another 4 years of the same foreign and domestic policies under a Republican president, one who in fact stands far to the right of both Bush and Cheney on some hawkish issues, would be an unmitigated disaster. Unfortunately we are in the minority on this issue -- the electorate is far more finicky and pliable, many of them do not have strong enough feelings or deep enough background to see the danger of a McCain presidency.
That said, a great deal of personal projection on the part of myself and everyone here has been exerted in the process of divining who among the remaining two Democratic candidates is best equipped to run against and defeat Senator McCain. What each person here brings to the debate are their own values, their own opinions of what is praise-worthy, and what is dismissed.
When this race began, I threw my support behind issues championed by candidates who were not electable by any stretch of the imagination to lend authority to those positions. I gave money to Gravel, to Kucinich and to Dodd. I knew that Clinton would be the presumptive nominee and I hoped that by running interference the candidates I supported would have a measurable impact in re-shaping what I felt to be Clinton's untenable policy positions (which I have enumerated here and elsewhere, and which have been enumerated by others more eloquent and informed than I).
I knew from 2006 that Obama would give Clinton a run for her money, but I found it unlikely that he would be the nominee. Maybe in 2012. I could not have predicted the ground swelling beneath Obama, nor the stumbling and plummeting of the Clinton campaign under the weight of the hubris of all parties involved, from Ferraro to Penn to Mr and Mrs Clinton themselves.
Going back to projection, I understand that many have staked a real emotional investment in the support of one candidate or another, and that their candidate can do no wrong and the other candidate is a dirty rotten scoundrel with no chance of winning in the general.
I would like to think that there is a factual basis as laid out above in this thread and elsewhere supporting the position that the Clintons have employed a strategy resembling the most deplorable, yet most winning GOP election campaign strategies: it is catty, litigious, trades in innuendo and message craft, it is propagandistic and dishonest. The near religious fervor surrounding the Obama campaign is one that, while the campaign itself does not discourage per se, it is hard to point at an adviser or a strategist or staffer whose fingerprints are all over it the way Penn, McAuliff and others have their prints all over the Clinton campaign. And it is a burlesque of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, the latter who was certain in 2006 that the Republicans would retain control of the Congress and couldn't have been more wrong. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, but still, the math is not the same as it was and Clinton seems to be running the campaign we all wish Kerry would have run in 2004.
It is not 2004. I think Obama has a real shot against McCain because he is not being played like a sock-puppet by the GOP and their usual bag of dirty tricks. I appreciate that Clinton hitting below the belt is a reaction to 20 years of Republican domination, but I have always been a Democrat and a progressive exactly because we are above dirty tricks, even when it loses elections. We are better than that.
For once, "we are better than that" has a chance of going to the White House. We can have our Aaron Sorkin-esque presidential president, a man (and someday a woman) a cut above the petty, mediocre man who inhabits the office now; a first among equals.
Obama doesn't walk on water, and just because she sinks doesn't make Clinton a witch, but he might win and she sure won't.
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Strange Bedfellows
[Read the article: "I'd hate me too!"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hate is a strong word, but I do find Moby and much of what he stands for annoying to the extreme (PETA, anybody?). But I have to agree entirely with his assessment of the Democratic primary campaign. Of course, maybe Moby and I aren't so different, considering I originally backed Kucinich and Gravel, then Dodd. I suppose we differ in that I never wanted Clinton to win the nomination because of her strong negatives, but would reluctantly vote for her if it were a choice between her and Senator McCain.
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God damn..
[Read the article: Cashing in on the Clinton campaign]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm in the wrong f*cking line of work, that's for sure.
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Super happy fun time
[Read the article: Why Hillary Clinton should be winning]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]God, what a bunch of whining, crybaby sore losers.
RJforHRC, Arabs can't contribute to a campaign now? What kind of shrill, un-American scumbag are you? Please, just register Republican and make it official. Sickening, truly.
Obama is cynical for playing by the rules? How do you people get dressed in the morning without help?
The lobbyist contribution thing has been talked to death and debunked, and this is really the pot calling the kettle a N-word, to be blunt. Saint Clinton is in the pocket of the worst of the worst from K-Street.
Please, now is the time to self-flagellation with the stick of reality you woefully deluded Clintonistas.