Garrison Keillor makes an excellent argument for Secretary Clinton:
I saw Hillary once working a rope line for more than an hour, a Secret Service man holding her firmly by the hips as she leaned over the rope and reached into the mass of arms and hands reaching out to her. She had learned the art of encountering the crowd and making it look personal. It was not glamorous work, more like picking fruit, and it took the sort of discipline your mother instills in you: those people waited to see you so by gosh you can treat them right.
So it’s no surprise she pushed herself to the point of collapse the other day. What’s odd is the perspective, expressed in several stories, that her determination to keep going reveals a “lack of transparency” —- that she should’ve announced she had pneumonia and gone home and crawled into bed.
I’ve never gone fishing with her, which is how you really get to know someone, but I did sit next to her at dinner once, one of those stiff dinners that is nobody’s idea of a wild good time, the conversation tends to be stilted, everybody’s beat, you worry about spilling soup down your shirtfront. She being First Lady led the way and she being a Wellesley girl, the way led upward. We talked about my infant daughter and schools and about Justice Blackmun, and I said how inspiring it was to sit and watch the Court in session, and she laughed and said, “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to show up in a courtroom where a member of my family might be a defendant.” A succinct and witty retort. And she turned and bestowed her attention on Speaker Dennis Hastert, who was sitting to her right. She focused on him and even made him chuckle a few times. I was impressed by her smarts, even more by her discipline.
I don’t have that discipline. Most people don’t. Politics didn’t appeal to me back in my youth, the rhetoric (“Ask not what your country can do for you”) was so wooden compared to “so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past,” so I walked dark rainy streets imagining the great novel I wouldn’t write and was still trying to be cool and indifferent well into my thirties, when other people were making a difference in the world.
Hillary didn’t have a prolonged adolescence and fiction was not her ambition. She doesn’t do dreaminess. What some people see as a relentless quest for power strikes me as the good habits of a serious Methodist. Be steady. Don’t give up. It’s not about you. Work for the night is coming.The woman who does not conceal her own intelligence is a fine American tradition, going back to Anne Bradstreet and Harriet Beecher Stowe and my ancestor Prudence Crandall, but none has been subjected to the steady hectoring that Mrs. Clinton has. She is the first major-party nominee to be pictured in prison stripes by the opposition. She is the first cabinet officer ever to be held personally responsible for her own email server, something ordinarily delegated to anonymous nerds in I.T. The fact that terrorists attacked an American compound in Libya under cover of darkness when Secretary Clinton presumably got some sleep has been held against her, as if she personally was in command of the defense of the compound, a walkie-talkie in her hand, calling in air strikes.
Extremism has poked its head into the mainstream, aided by the Internet. Back in the day, you occasionally saw cranks on a street corner handing out mimeographed handbills arguing that FDR was responsible for Pearl Harbor, but you saw their bad haircuts, the bitterness in their eyes, and you turned away. Now they’re in your computer, whispering that the economy is on the verge of collapse and for a few bucks they’ll tell you how to protect your savings. But lacking clear evidence, we proceed forward. We don’t operate on the basis of lurid conjecture.
Someday historians will get this right and look back at the steady pitter-pat of scandals that turned out to be nothing, nada, zero and ixnay and will conclude that, almost a century after women’s suffrage, almost 50 years after Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law, a woman was required to run for office wearing concrete shoes. Check back fifty years from now and if I’m wrong, go ahead and dance on my grave.
Here’s another piece, this one from the Chicago Tribune:
..A Hillary Clinton presidency would be Nixonian in terms of enemies lists, paranoid fear of media, lack of transparency, etc.
He too lost out to a less experienced but more charismatic speaker, and never quite forgave the voters for not choosing him. He also regarded himself as the most qualified candidate ever and could not understand why nobody liked him.
I don’t see your apparent quote anywhere here, either in the text or either of the cited links. When I searched for your quote, verbatim, Google can’t find anything.
Where does this attack on Ms. Clinton come from, and why do you offer it here on this thread?
You think Hillary Clinton is “Nixonian”? Interesting who uprated this scurrilous attack.
After more than twenty years of attacks about Whitewater, attacks about Vince Foster, attacks about just about anything she says, does, or is, you think she has a “paranoid” fear of the media?
You must have a different definition of “paranoid” than me.
Your attack is particularly ironic given the nominee of your chosen party.
That is some extra nasty stuff to dump on a woman who simply has a different opinion than you. I don’t subscribe to her opinion as I am voting for HRC. But she has made clear in the past that she does not support Trump although I hold no pretense to know how she will vote in November.
But Porcu is a woman who has actually has had jobs in the policy and opinion–making side of government (unlike you). You are the guy who formerly called everyone who disagreed with you a “liar” until the BMG managers told you to knock it off. So again, knock it off with her.
No “BMG editors” have made any such objection. They asked me to dial back my responses to your relentless and relentlessly personal attacks, such as this one, and I have complied. I don’t remember them making any mention of my use of the term “liar”.
My comment here is not personal. I asked a simple question — is this her personal opinion, or is she sharing the opinion of an unattributed source.
I stand by my question and by my criticism of her comment.
I might add that my experience with “porcupine” (or her earlier handle, “PeterPorcupine” on the old site) here at BMG (which predates your participation by many years) is that she needs no defense from you nor anyone else — she is perfectly capable of defending her point of view and has been doing that for pretty much a decade here.
Meanwhile, I’ll tell you what is some “extra nasty stuff”:
THAT is extra nasty.
You write (emphasis mine):
From the BMG rules:
for the erroneous downrate
Not everything on BMG needs to be derived from somebody else.
As far as Foster, et al, goes there is an old saying that just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you. But going back to IRS files on Republicans mysteriously turning up in the West Wings, the Clintons have had an unusual level of anxiety about anyone who disagrees with them, and Hillary Clinton seems secretive and bitter to a degree that is almist…Nixonian.
… rather concise and spot-on hindsight view of Nixon provides any foresight about Clinton. The situations are superficially similar, true, but your imputation of self-regard, inability to forgive, lack of understanding, paranoia and resentment at not being liked are only that: imputations. They are not even inferences, lacking as they do, any supporting evidence given by Secretary Clinton.
At least as regards the ability to forgive Secretary Clinton has some very public examples of having done so.
Or we might call it part of the LBJ nostalgia on left. Either way, the theory goes that she has the balls to be President since she knows how to wage effective partisan warfare.
Arguably even more so than the cerebral and above the fray Obama, who limply allowed majorities in Congress and the statehouses to disappear on his watch. Hillary is a Machiavellian in the shrewdest sense of the word, who will follow her idol LBJ in inverting Clausewitz and viewing politics as war by other means.
I am not defending this position, but it is not necessarily the case that Nixonian is an epithet or the mark of a poor leader. Nixon was one of our most successful presidents in terms of passing major policies he set out to pass. We may disagree with these policies, and he was certainly undone by paranoia and hubris in the end. But there is a lot to learn from him and LBJ, and presumably Hillary is more aware of these parallels than most.
I see these attacks from you all the time Tom, and you also like to bring up John T May’s past as a former conservative to defame him in this way. Disagree with them by disproving the merits of their accusations, there are ways to do this without constantly making the guilt by association fallacy.
Especially since May is on the record as a leftist critic of Clinton, while Porcupine is a Johnson supporter disillusioned with both nominees. These are defensible positions that help make BMG more ideologically diverse, and I welcome interesting debates around them.
… go after Trump first if she’s going to make any attacks based upon a demonstrated, or even guessed-at, lack of character.
Seriously in contest for the title of ‘vain, distrustful, bitter and petty’ Secretary Clinton doesn’t even place in the top 100…. all the while Nixon and Trump vie for first. Which makes calling out Secretary Clinton for these things distinctly… um.. what’s the word… Somebody help me out here… it’s on the tip of my tongue…