Getting Mrs. Clinton [Peggy Noonan]

The Wall Street Journal ^ | March 28, 2008 | PEGGY NOONAN

[Aristotelian]

I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.

That's what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac -- and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought -- either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual).

But either you get it now or you never will. That's the importance of the Bosnia tape.

Many in the press get it, to their dismay, and it makes them uncomfortable, for it sours life to have a person whose character you feel you cannot admire play such a large daily role in your work. But I think it's fair to say of the establishment media at this point that it is well populated by people who feel such a lack of faith in Mrs. Clinton's words and ways that it amounts to an aversion. They are offended by how she and her staff operate. They try hard to be fair. They constantly have to police themselves.

[the invisib1e hand]

She is Illinois and Arkansas trash. That is nowhere near Appalachia. If you're going to be a bigot, at least use appropriate stereotypes.

This has to be my favorite. Thanks for showing me how it's done!

[the invisib1e hand]

Well, praytell, what literary classics have come from Appalachia?

Now, really, I would never have known that Arkansas (and the sorts of things that emmanate therefrom) was on the opposite side of the galaxy of Appalachia. I want to thank the whole clan who chimed in here for the enlightening feedback.

Hey, I happen to really like bluegrass music.

[the invisib1e hand]

;). I took the heat on this one.

[kalee]

Here is a list of Appalachian authors
Thomas Wolfe
Pearl S. Buck
Wendell Berry
Carson McCullers
O. Henry
Flannery O’Connor
Robert Penn Warren
John Crowe Ransom
Richard Weaver

Those are just ones who come immediately to mind, I’ll think about it some more while I’m eating supper.

[TN4Liberty]

This has to be my favorite. Thanks for showing me how it's done!

The difference is that I was not stereotyping. I didn't imply everyone from those areas was trash. I merely said she was trash and from those areas. Your comment was simply an attack on an entire region.

Geographically accurate bigotry on your part would have been to say "if Shakespeare had been from the Ozarks" or "If Shakespeare had been from Midwest." It's still bigotry, but at least the appropriate region is attacked.

That's how it's done.