The Butterfly & the Scorpion in a Bottle

Hillary Clinton may not be a great natural politician, but traveling across the country on her own Bus Named Desire, she has crawled through glass to get the role right.

She showed again with her squeaker win in Indiana that for many white working-class men, she is The Man — more tenacious and less concerned with the judgments of the tony set, economists and editorial writers. Talking up guns, going to the Auto Racing Hall of Fame, speaking from the back of pickup trucks and doing shots of populism with a cynicism chaser, Hillary emerged from a lifetime of government limos to bask as queen of the blue-collar prom.

Just as Obama spent his youth trying not to be threatening, so as not to unnerve whites, Hillary spent her life learning to beat back challenges to her and her husband — from Republicans and from "bimbo eruptions" and now from a charmed younger rival. As Obama learned to accommodate, the accommodating Hillary learned to triangulate. As he learned that following the rules could get you far with adoring mentors, she learned from Dick Morris and Mark Penn that following rules was for saps.

Hillary is less Blanche than Scarlett. "Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you," Rhett told the willful belle at the start of her rugged odyssey.

And heaven help the Democrats as they try to shake off Hillary. On top of her inane vows to obliterate Iran and OPEC, she plans "a nuclear option" during her Shermanesque march to Denver. Tom Edsall reported on The Huffington Post that the Hillaryites will try, at a May 31 meeting of the Democratic Rules and Bylaws Committee, to renege on their word and get the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. As she addressed supporters, she urged counting the votes of Florida and Michigan, noting "it would be a little strange to have a nominee chosen by 48 states."

"It's full speed onto the White House," she said. Fox News reports that the Clintons are planning a summer campaign week with TV appearances, fliers and rallies, between the end of the primary and the convention, to drag back superdelegates trying to flock to Obama.

It's hard to believe that this Hillary is the same Wellesley girl who said she yearned for a more "ecstatic and penetrating mode of living." What would that young Hillary — who volunteered on Gene McCarthy's anti-war campaign; who cried the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; who referred to some of her "smorgasbord of personalities" in a 1967 letter to a friend as an "alienated academic," an "involved pseudo-hippie"; who once returned a bottle of perfume after feeling guilty about the poverty around her — think of this shape-shifting Hillary?

She's so at odds with who she used to be, even in the Senate, that if she were to get elected, who would voters be electing?

Obama is like her idealistic, somewhat naive self before the world launched 1,000 attacks against her, turning her into the hard-bitten, driven politician who has launched 1,000 attacks against Obama.

As she makes a last frenzied and likely futile attempt to crush the butterfly, it's as though she's crushing the remnants of her own girlish innocence.
http://www.journal-news.com/o/content/oh/story/opinions/editorial/2008/05/07/swg050808dowd.html

what Barack Obama is now...

and was a GOLDWATER GIRL....oops, left that part out...

I know she didn't vote FOR War.

She voted for what was something like a 50:50 chance that all the horrible things that have happened would happen. I know 50:50 is normally considered indeterminent, but considering the immensity and duration of all of the suffering, 50:50 was tooooooo high.

Why did she do it? She supported the possibility of this horror, because she planned to run for pResident and the folks she was listening to told her that she needed to be "strong on defense". I can't for the life of me understand why she couldn't figure our a better way to be "strong on defense", except that she, like W, had become so habituated to service that she just didn't think the risk was as high as it was.