Clintonian calculations

[wyldwolf]

Bill and Hillary Clinton usually stay at least 72 hours ahead of me. It's on that third day that I begin to say, "Oh, now I see." There was the time when Bill was governor of Arkansas and out of state and his Democratic primary opponent was holding a news conference in the state Capitol to blast his chronic absenteeism. Hillary just so happened to walk by and interrupt. "Oh, give me a break," she bellowed toward the unsuspecting challenger, then lectured him as the TV cameras turned her way.

The poor candidate couldn't figure out how to fight back against an opponent's heckling wife -- having never before encountered one -- and was quickly reduced to rubble. My instinctive reaction was that the Clintons had erred by sending a wife to do a husband's job, behaved altogether boorishly and engendered sympathy for the challenger. Not so. People loved it. They talked about her spunk rather than that her husband was seldom in a state that he was presuming to get re-elected to govern. The political dynamic was tweaked. The race was over. The Clintons won again.

Roles may reverse, but brains stay the same.

We had that business last Sunday in which Bill went off on Fox News, showing publicly what some have seen in more profane versions privately.

My instinctive reaction was that the attention-starved former president had merely galvanized the polarized, meaning he'd solidified himself as the champion of hardened Democrats while solidifying Fox as the champion of hardened Republicans. I thought he'd made a good case that he'd done more than Bush to try to get Osama bin Laden. But I thought he'd come across as megalomaniacal and narcissistic. I thought he'd let the ABC terrorism miniseries get to him and lost his temper unattractively.

As political analysis went, that turned out to be merely the outermost and thinnest layer of the onion.

It was on the third day when I noticed that the American political conversation had begun to shift ever so slightly, which might be quite enough for an electorate pretty much tied 50-50.

The war on terror was no longer conceded as the Bush administration's home field.

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/Oct-01-Sun-2006/opinion/9916287.html

[Hav]

1. .

Interesting. In a following poll, some days later, far more rather blamed Bush than Clinton for 9/11. So he might have appeared angry, as someone who lost his temper. But obviously, he also seemed to be someone who was absolutely persuaded of the things he had to say and who wanted the truth to be made public.

[AtomicKitten]

2. I never doubted the intent nor the impact.

But then again I am immune to the Dem-bashing here at DU.

[cornermouse]

3. This is a symptom.

It is a symptom of a disease called pundit-itis. It appears to be some sort of infection which spreads rapidly.

Pundit-itis is a strange weakness of mental processing in which the victim becomes convinced that if they do everything just right and don't rock any boats everyone will like them and they will become a winner in the political arena. What they don't realize is that others (carriers of the disease pundit-itis) look at their neverending efforts to please and acquiesence and recognize that this is a disease that they can use to their advantage and that's exactly what they do. They (carriers of pundit-itis) encourage the victim's earnest desire to please, even to the point of removing their own backbone, and then turn around and condemn and harangue them for being obstructionists. (Go figure)

At this point, we are searching high and low for a vaccine. Unfortunately although we do have some promising possibilities, at this time there is no cure.