Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
-
What do you mean "we"?
[Read the article: The comeback chick]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The makings of Clinton's comeback in New Hampshire were invisible to everyone, including me. ... Nobody knows why the polls and pundits were so wrong.
Speak for yourself, Joan! (Okay, okay, you are. But you're also speaking for everyone else.)
The campaign is way, way too fluid at this early stage for anyone, at any point, to have clinched it. The only candidates who can be safely discounted this early on are the ones who have dropped out (and even then...).
It was always clear, pundits be durned, that being able to adapt to the shifting political tectonics in a volatile campaign year would be the key to winning — and there's no way to know in advance who is going to do the best job of that.
And as for polls, weren't all the polls saying everyone was undecided until the last minute? What needs to be explained there?
The results of any given state, no matter how early, don't mean anything by themselves. As Clausewitz said of war, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. It's all — all — about being able to change your game as you see what your rivals are up to — and about having laid your groundwork right so that later on, when that time does come, you have the flexibility you need.
Obama upset Clinton and marginalized Edwards by aggressively pursuing a get-out-the-vote strategy that maximized his strengths in Iowa. The ball was in their court, and Clinton had the agility to run it down and hand Obama back some of his own medicine in New Hampshire.
But Iowa and New Hampshire are small states. They're not deciding factors in and of themselves — they just don't represent enough votes to matter. They're important because they give us early indications of who's on their game and who isn't. It could have been Edwards who came from behind — only this time around, it wasn't.
Clinton's resurgence in the last two days had a lot to do with her sudden accessibility, spontaneity and yes, even vulnerability. Taking questions from audiences and reporters. Admitting in the Saturday debate that being considered not likable "hurts my feelings." And yes, even the tears.
This is Clinton changing her game. The real question after Iowa was not, "Will she admit defeat now or later?" but "Does she have what it takes to adapt?" Anyone who wants to be making real predictions for the Democrats this early on needs to be out there figuring out how to answer that.
-
"Began" to notice?
[Read the article: The witch ain't dead, and Chris Matthews is a ding-dong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was reading along, nodding with wary skepticism as I followed Rebecca Traister's conversion narrative, until I got to this:
And then ... people began to notice [that Clinton was being targeted unfairly].
Cue sound of screeching brakes. Editor, it's 2008, and Hillary Clinton has been the unending target of screeching hatred from the American right wing, and laughing putdowns from the center, for 16 years. This year newly eligible voters have never known a world free of Clinton-hate. Who are these concerned feminists who only "began to notice" after the Iowa caucuses, and what is their problem? How did Rebecca Traister manage to pitch a column based on the premise that this is all a sudden, shocking discovery, without getting a reality check?
Personally, I don't see Clinton's tears as any sort of a redemptive moment in American gender politics. She's the neat, smart, aloof girl with all the answers who sits in front of the class, hated by everyone else — only now that the bullying boys made her cry, all the girls feel bad and are willing to accept her as their jump-rope partner. At least for today.
It's a crude schoolyard dynamic and is not in any way a credit to anyone involved — except maybe for Clinton, who knew she had to come up with a new plan after Iowa, and found one that worked.
-
What marriage is about
[Read the article: I now pronounce you ... selfish and condescending?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But for me, marriage was more about other people's ideas, legal protections and extended family traditions ...
Carol Lloyd's reasons for getting married are hardly to be faulted — marriage fundamentally is about other people, legal protections, and community traditions. (Okay, and also economics.)
In fact without those factors it's hard to imagine what marriage would even mean. The idea that getting married should be a form of self-expression is a shallow conceit — throughout history couples have been perfectly capable of expressing themselves, in all their myriad couple-y ways, outside the bounds of matrimony. Quite enthusiastically, one might add.
Marriage is about something else — it's about standing before the higher powers of your world (family and community, deity or polity — whatever it may be) and making a commitment to stick with someone for the purpose of social continuity and the greater good of all involved.
So, yeah, it's juvenile to sneer at marriage and then turn around and have a "commitment ceremony," as if getting married is anything other than just that. As if a relationship could be defined by a ceremony any more than a piece of paper!
And for pity's sake, the same goes for churches and white dresses and lavish entertainment and so on. You're just as married if you're wed by your neighbor, barefoot on the good green earth, with nothing but sky overhead and an "amen" for a reception.
So good for Eslinger for getting married — okay, okay, "making her commitment" — in a unostentatious manner of her own choosing. But maybe the lack of pretense has created a void in her life that she feels the need to fill by looking down on everyone else. Whatever the reason, and the foolishness of various criticism of her notwithstanding, she's still being pretentious.