Hillary: The Big Sister We Can Do Without

Human Events ^ | 03/22/2007 | Steve Chapman

[Mia T]

Hillary: The Big Sister We Can Do Without

by Steve Chapman

Posted 03/22/2007 ET

Everyone knows Hillary Rodham Clinton, and everyone has a different reaction to her. Some find her as irritating as fingernails on a chalkboard. Some find that she makes their skin crawl. Some run screaming from the room. And some want to drink a gallon of rat poison while lying across a railroad track.

The conventional wisdom is that the former first lady will be a formidable presidential candidate because she has lots of money, veteran campaign aides, a shrewd political sense and a close connection to a president beloved by Democrats. But those may be nothing next to a couple of fairly major factors operating against her.

The first is that many people in both parties see her as ideologically repellent. Conservatives think she's an arrogant busybody with an addiction to big government. The left regards her as a cynical trimmer who can't admit when she's wrong.

The second is that many people, again in both parties, just can't stand her. You want a uniter, not a divider? Hillary has a way of uniting people who ordinarily would be pelting each other with eggs.

That explains the appeal of the new YouTube ad, modeled on Apple's famous "1984" Super Bowl commercial, which portrays her as a blandly sinister Big Sister on a giant screen, uttering phony platitudes to an army of robotic slaves. It ends happily when a blonde female athlete sprints in and hurls a sledgehammer at the screen, obliterating the image.

Though the ad included a plug for Barack Obama (who denies any involvement), it would draw equal ovations if it were shown at a meeting of MoveOn.org or The Heritage Foundation. Which raises the question: If the right regards her as a dangerous leftist and the left regards her as an unprincipled accomplice in the Iraq disaster, who really likes her?

It's not as though she warms the hearts of moderates everywhere. Her husband was a master of triangulating between the two poles. But Hillary's efforts to place herself in the sensible center suggest naked opportunism, not hardheaded practicality.

The candidate we all know is the one portrayed by Amy Poehler in the "Saturday Night Live" skit who, when asked about her original position on Iraq, replied with a condescending smile, "I think most Democrats know me. They understand that my support for the war was always insincere."

Any candidate can suffer reputational damage during the course of a bitterly fought election. But Hillary rouses an exceptional amount of dislike even before we've been reminded of her flaws.

In a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, only 19 percent of those surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of Barack Obama. Even the abrasive Rudolph Giuliani had only a 22 percent unfavorable score. But 40 percent had an unfavorable opinion of her.

A December poll found 47 percent of Americans would not even consider voting for Hillary. Karlyn Bowman, a polling expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and author of a forthcoming report on attitudes about Hillary, says she can't remember a major party presidential candidate whose negative rating was so high at the start of a campaign.

Conservatives, of course, remember her angry response when her husband was accused of having sex with Monica Lewinsky -- which she dismissed as a smear from a "vast, right-wing conspiracy." It turned out her enemies were telling the truth and she was not.

But even many Democrats find her impossible to take. A recent online poll by The Nation, a leftist magazine, asked readers to name her "greatest weakness." Among the choices it offered, besides her refusal to apologize for supporting the Iraq war resolution, were "her rigid, poll-driven style" and "her tendency to stomp all over her critics."

Much of the support she has comes from people who wish her husband could serve a third term. But weak nostalgia is a poor campaign theme. And Hillary fails on one of the most basic tests: personality.

This is someone, after all, who will be in our living rooms every night for at least four years. Looking back on recent elections, the candidate who wins is usually the more likeable one -- Bush over Gore, Clinton over Dole, Bush over Dukakis, Reagan over Carter. Polls indicate that the aversion to Hillary is less about her politics than about her as a person, and overcoming that sentiment will not be easy.

As the campaign proceeds, some people will be hoping for her to succeed. But I'm betting a lot more will be rooting for the blonde with the sledgehammer.

Mr. Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune.

Advertise | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions
Copyright © 2007 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

HILLARY!
Can a chintzed-and-powdered villain win the White House?
LEADING INDICATORS SAY 'NO'
MISSUS CLINTON'S SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE PROBLEM - PART FIVE
CLINTON-GEFFEN IMBROGLIO-PART SIX
by Mia T, 3.01.07

ven the most casual observer of the American political scene would agree: It's a tossup as to whose stage presence, hillary clinton's or Al Gore's, is the more ridiculous.

But as opposed to hillary-on-stage, Al thereon has a saving grace: He doesn't try to appear human. To the contrary, Al Gore embraces his humanoid essence. (In fairness to missus clinton, 'inhuman' is a measurably less salable descriptor than 'humanoid.')

To better understand why this is such an advantage for Mr. Gore, simply consider missus clinton's recent 'conversation' (with herself).

It was risible. Unintentional theater of the absurd: A chintzed-and-powdered villain, a soulless, angry, arrogant scold, oozing cloying, saccharine-coated evil, pulsating to the metronomic swing of stubby appendages--claws too short to grab its prey.

(Gesticulation is a dud's only sign of life... and then only if she has a speech coach to prod her.)


The performance was nothing if not humiliating: A direct measure of hillary clinton's hunger for power. Which reminds me... enough of that red Klingon power jacket already.

The fatal problem with the clinton machine's extravagant, fanciful and elaborate construction is not the absurdity, however. It is the architectonics.

A precarious 20th-century conceit, the hillary! construct totters on a crumbling foundation of clinton lies, abuses and betrayals.

It should have been no surprise that David Geffen's comments to Maureen Dowd would so easily topple it.

But to the average clinton lackey, it apparently was.

A barrage of polls are shooting down the endless post-Geffen-imbroglio clinton-agitprop chatter that had called hillary clinton and her machine the hands-down winner.

According to the latest Zogby Poll, Barack Obama is gaining fast on missus clinton. The Quinnipiac University Poll released today reports that Giuliani has widened his lead over missus clinton in New Jersey (50-41).

But it is this week's Keystone Poll that foreshadows the final outcome. Rudy demolishes clinton in blue Pe-Ay (53-37). But more significantly, hillary clinton's favorable/unfavorable rating is a dismal 32/46. (The other candidates have net positive favorable ratings.)

We have argued elsewhere that the only way missus clinton can win elections is to run virtually unopposed, and then only if she remains immobil, hidden, mute, a prisoner of her own ineptitude, repulsiveness and criminality.

But of the three, it is missus clinton's repulsiveness--her ugliness--that will do her in.

The voters routinely ignore ineptitude, forgive criminality, but they never abide ugliness. Never.

 

The clintons, as is their wont, are now taking this proxy scheme to even more outrageous extremes.

The latest: an actual hillary clinton proxy presidency, populated on both sides of the camera by assorted rodham and clinton ex-staffers, sycophants and should-be felons, witness the latest hire.

'Commander-in-Chief,' a show that sets out to crown a 'queen,' instead exposes the kitschy simplemindedness of Hollywood fantasy and the special sway and shortsightedness of the pathologic ego.

Mia T, 10.27.05
THE DANGER OF RUNNING VICARIOUSLY
Bill O'Reilly chews up and spits out the hillary clinton candidacy
(clip included)

Running vicariously, as we have argued, has its risks.

What was supposed to be Hollywood propaganda to make a hillary presidency marginally palatable has instead become a parable about missus clinton's own dystopian future.

ABC announced the other day that it is pulling "Commander-in-Chief" off the air "until spring." Missus clinton's proxy presidency, you see, has been in a ratings free fall ever since "American Idol" took it on.

In a perverse life-mirrors-art moment, support for the real-life missus clinton's presidency has plummeted, too. This even sans Rudy, her real-life "American Idol" opponent.

'Ars artia gratis.' Please!

Samuel Goldwyn must be turning over in his grave....

'HIATUS' FOR HILLARY?
by Mia T, 02.02.06

"The power of the harasser, the abuser, the rapist depends above all on the silence of women." ¹

VOTE SMART: A WARNING TO ALL WOMEN ABOUT HILLARY CLINTON

MY RESPONSE TO
'VOTE DIFFERENT'
(Obama-Apple 1984 Ad Mashup)

(YouTube video--please FReep)
by Mia T, 3.11.07

[Mia T]

I have been sleep-deprived this week. ;)

[patriotspride]

I'll take any erosion

The thought of her, or the two of them, in any presidental form
is disappointing for our great country.

[eleni121]

Hilliary ---the big evil foster mother.

[eleni121]

We know what you are MS Rodham

I love that hero standing next to the bad seed---he knows the score.