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• Friday, February 29, 2008 09:35 AM

  My Rational Choice

  I'm amazed, at this point, that Ms. Clinton still seems to be holding ground in Ohio, that she manages to find any shelter at all under precariously hanging rocks. Her campaign has been a dismal failure, though this is only part of the explanation of why she won't win the nomination.

  The real problem with Hillary Clinton, the reason she can only occasionally "find her voice", is her utter lack of authenticity. As a rather vivid demonstration of this, I saw that yesterday, she suddenly began dropping her r's, noticeably talking down to her largely blue collar audience. Suddenly, our Wellesley and Yale educated candidate began to speak of Obama "runnin' " on such and such a platform and "toutin' " his policies. I was truly embarassed for her, this foray into the vernacular as awkward a spectacle as President Bush attempting an African tribal dance.

  Why seize on these seemingly unimportant moments? Because they're revelatory of a deep-seeded problem of integrity, the same issue that led her to vote to authorize war in Iraq so as not to appear weak (keeping in mind that she would, in the near future, be running for President); the same personal flaw that was revealed even earlier, in fact, when she suddenly appeared in New York with a Yankees cap and announced that she would be making a bid for the senate, that she had a Jewish grandparent, and so on.

  Somewhat successfully, she has managed to convince some of her supporters that there has been a media bias against her, and Clintonites willingly accept this explanation of her lack of success in the past few weeks. On an alternative tack, she and her campaign have constructed the "Obama as Messiah" delusion, or the idea that Obama is a purveyor of a particularly insidious snake oil-- that of false hope. None of this could be further from the truth, of course. The hope that Obama offers is based on pragmatic policies that are spelled out in detail on his website, though discussed only in generality during debates. There's an interesting article in both the NY Times and the New Republic that attest to Obama's economic and foreign relations acuity (from which springs the hope of his supposedly "rapt" supporters):

  http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4d40a39e-8f57-4054-bd99-94bc9d19be1a&k=12040

  Interestingly, the article got me thinking about Clinton's precipitous reversal of fortune, and my explanation for it is simply that she has been found out, and on a grand scale. Original support for Senator Clinton was tentative, based as it was on irrational thinking. She was the default choice, annointed as the Democratic fron-runner, a concept that had been marketed from the time her husband left office. Many Clinton supporters liked her simply because so many others seemed to (and so many on the right seemed to affrim her credentials by reviling her so much). Never mind that she was associated with a moderate administration that consistently betrayed its more left-leaning constituents, as others above have noted. As Thaler and other behavioral economists have discovered, people sometimes accept irrational default choices if the alternative of "opting out" requires effort, in this case the intellectual exercise of evaluating Obama. Given how easy it is to approve of Obama as an alternative, as I say, I'm surprised that Clinton's still in this thing; I'm surprised that rationality hasn't already prevailed and snuffed out her illusion.

  Mark W

  —markworthi Read markworthi's other letters
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