What's Not to Like

Yes, it is Peggy Noonan, however I think that some of her observations are valid -qe

The Wall Street Journal

What's Not to Like
By PEGGY NOONAN
June 23, 2007; Page P16

Hillary Clinton doesn't have to prove she's a man. She has to prove she's a woman. She doesn't have to prove to people that she's tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief. She doesn't have to show she could and would wage a war. She has to prove she has normal human warmth, a normal amount of give, of good nature, that she is not, at bottom, grimly combative and rather dark. This is the woman credited with starting and naming the War Room. Her staff has nicknamed her "The Warrior." Get in her way and she'd squish you like a bug. This has been her reputation for 20 years. And it is her big problem. People want a president to be strong but not hard.


A longtime supporter of Mrs. Clinton's spoke with candor some months back of her friend's predicament. "We're back where we were in '92 -- likability. Nothing has changed." Back then, when the Clintons were newly famous, their consultants were alarmed to find the American people did not believe Hillary was a mother. They thought she was a person with breasts in a suit. She had a briefcase and a latte and was late for the meeting, but no way did she have a child. So the Clintons began to include their daughter, Chelsea, then 12, in campaign appearances. Which helped.

Where is Chelsea now? She's trying to parallel park. The Sopranos video the Clintons made and released this week was smart and well done. It was witty and it was, quite literally, daring. It addressed yet again the likability problem, but from a new angle... In the short Soprano film, Mrs. Clinton was beautifully made up and quietly dressed in slacks and sweater like a handsome suburban lady waiting for her man at a booth in a diner. He looked great too. Of all modern presidents, Bill Clinton was most made for the camera. And he can really act. He actually looked disappointed at being served carrots and not onion rings.

The film jokingly acknowledges what the Clintons well know: that a certain portion of the voting population sees them as . . . well, as gangsterish. As dark, and dishonest to a degree more extreme than is usual even in political figures. By putting these perceptions so colorfully on the table, they make fun of them. And they invite their foes to go too far at just the right moment, a year before the 2008 presidential race really begins. This is a good time for the Clinton campaign to face the charge that they're Tony and Carmella. In a year such comments will be old hat, "a rehash," or, as one of her campaign aides said when asked for reaction on the recent Hillary biographies -- it was the best staff line of the year -- "Is it possible for you to quote me yawning?"

(snip)

As for her attempts to appeal to centrists, two items deserve note. One is that Mrs. Clinton has taken, on the stump, to referring to herself as "born . . . in the middle of America in the middle of the century." This is interesting because it's word for word what George H.W. Bush said in 1988 when he introduced his choice of Dan Quayle. She has also taken to referring to herself as famous but unknown, which is exactly what was said of Vice President Bush the same year. Mrs. Clinton seems to have been studying 1988, which was the last time anyone won the presidency in a landslide... But there is another side of the Clinton campaign, and I found some of it this week. It is a new Web site called HillaryIs44.com. It is rather mysterious. It does not divulge who is running the site, or who staffs it. It is not interactive; it has one informative voice, and its target audience seems to be journalists and free-lance oppo artists... But if Mrs. Clinton's aides want to understand better her likability problem, they should look at this site. It's dark in there.

(snip)


URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118254785028645232.html (subscription)

:thumbsdown:

"I love so completely that, honestly, she would have to burn down the White House before I would say anything bad about her!" exclaimed Nora Ephron in a 1993 Newsday interview. Three years later, she told the Wellesley class of 1996, "Understand: Every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you." Come late 2006, however, Ephron was the one on the attack as one of the self-described "Hillary resisters"--those who believe that "she will do anything to win, who believe she doesn't really take a position unless it's completely safe," as she wrote on her Huffington Post blog, "who believe she has taken the concept of triangulation and pushed it to a geometric level never achieved by anyone including her own husband, who can't stand her position on the war, who don't trust her as far as you can spit."

From http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070702/chaudhry

5:38 PM, to be exact.

why did you not post that catty comment there?

And, I did post a catty comment. Articles by Miss Peggy are more appropriately posted at FR. Unless, of course, one has an agenda. Hmmm...