Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Slacker In This Race (1:07 pm)
Frank Rich takes on Hillary Clinton’s last remaining arguments about how she is the candidate of action. Check it. It’s brutal and right on the mark:
…It’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating
The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3…
As for countering what she sees as the empty Obama brand of hope, she offers only a chilly void: Abandon hope all ye who enter here. This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.
posted by Jarrett
Reader Comments
Why does Hillary Clinton look like the actor CHRISTOPHER WALKEN ????
posted by jayboogie67 on 2-28-08 at 3:12 AM
She lost me when she crassly attempted to change the rules by attempting to add in the delegates from Florida. Her hope that the superdelegates would save her was equally vile. She is a horrid person and frankly, unelectable.
"No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.”
Well, if some of the voters are crossover Republicans who hope to get Obama nominated because they have reason to believe that Cinton would be a stronger candidate, then maybe she’s got a good point.
posted by Major Major on 2-27-08 at 4:23 PM