Letters to the Editor
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@AKA Smith
Totally with you on eliminating the Hillary haters--I just want to do the same with the Obama haters. If Hillary is the candidate, I will support her, and yes, it makes me nervous that Republicans are taking notes here and on other sites and putting together all the points that Democrats have so willingly laid out for them. But the same is true for the other side: All the accusations about zombie/puppet supporters for Obama DO NOT help him. This will be picked up immediately and used (if he is the nominee). My objection is not merely that it harms him; my objection is that it's not true. There's no question that many find him inspirational and there's no question that he chooses not to weigh his speeches with statistics and policy, but imo that is a style difference and has nothing to do with the actual content of his policy. I remember all the way back to 1992 when everyone was vilifying Bill Clinton as "Slick Willie" and talking about how silver his tongue was, etc.; a friend and I lamented how unfair it was that people assumed that just because he was a good speaker he was slick. I think a slightly different twist is happening with Obama: Just because he is a good speaker, he is shallow. The whole "Where's the beef?" lack of substance thing is already being thrown around by the right (Bill Bennet on radio today), casually, as though completely unassailable. Let me tell you, there is nothing featherweight about editing the Harvard Law Review, and substantively, there is genuinely little difference between him and Clinton.
For your information, after much thought, these are the precise reasons that pushed me over the edge against Clinton:
1. her vote in the fall of 2002. I think it was a political miscalcuation.
2. What she/Bill bring out in others. It's a hard, hard reality and it is a legitimate argument. I'm just not up for another 4-8 years of right-wing orgasmic nastiness against the Clintons. It took everything out of me from 1998-2004, and I've lost friends over it. There is a part of me that will never forgive the US press and the legions of American idiots who sidelined US policy for years while we fiddled around with the Lewinsky thing. I can't stand the way HRC was damned if she did and damned if she didn't (stay with Bill, run for Senate then Pres, whatever), and while you may see her run as some kind of redemption, I see it as potential resurrection for the right-wing conspiracy that's currently lost some steam.