CSotD: ‘What does “more” mean when you start from nothing?’
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Scott Stantis on the results in New Hampshire, and the general demise of Hillary Clinton's "inevitability." I love her facial expression, and — issues of whether carriage wheels have tires aside – I'm intrigued by the sickle he chose as the tool of deflation.
Communism? Or the more basic symbol of peasantry, from which the communists borrowed it?
Either way, the numbers coming out of New Hampshire are clear, and, if she wants the nomination, she needs to do not just a little better with young voters, but a whole lot better.
As Joel Pett suggests, it's a tall order.
It's hard to sell inspiring pragmatism, when the two concepts seem fundamentally at odds. Pragmatism is not inspiring until you get under the hood and really see the inner workings, while, to continue that metaphor, most people only know how to put in gasoline and (maybe) check the oil.
The toxic aspect of that superficiality is that people will believe blatantly, deliberately untrue things, whether it's Swift Boat lies about John Kerry's military record or the willful misstatements in which Sanders' plans to raise taxes on the wealthy become an across-the-board increase.
Even at a more innocent level, image matters. Madeline Albright's once-fresh witticism about a place in hell for women who don't help other women has been taken well out of context, but, like Al Gore's perfectly factual statement about his part in developing the Internet, once it is has entered the zeitgeist, the facts become secondary to the perception.
It's not enough to correct it: You have to overcome it.
A major part of Hillary Clinton's problem with younger voters is that, as Pett says, she comes across as something of an Old School stiff, and another part of her problem is that she is an Old School stiff.
Which is why she is being beaten among young voters by a fellow who is six years older than she is. Bernie may be old, but he's not Old School and he's no stiff.
Much has been made of both Bernie's "anger" and of the criticism of Hillary when she yells, and it's a pretty good place to examine "authenticity."
It's not sexism to snicker when Hillary yells. There have been women politicians who have spoken with passion, including Barbara Jordan, who didn't actually yell in 1974 when she electrified the country, and Ella Grasso and Bella Abzug, who pretty much did, but whose "yelling" was accepted as part of who they were, even by people who didn't like who they were.
(Though, granted, Abzug pushed back, saying that “women have been trained to talk softly and carry a lipstick.”)
The response to Hillary's shouting is, rather, a response to inauthenticity, the same "are you kidding me?" reaction that emerges whenever a nerdy politician tries to be hip.
Howard Dean's famous — "infamous" — yell was the result of a technical flaw, but the fact remains that shouting, fist-pumps and other expressions of passion don't work for everyone.
Look: All the leading politicians were honor students. It's a necessary first step on the career ladder. Some are very nerdy, some are only a little nerdy and some — like Barack Obama or Bill Clinton — are not in the least nerdy.
But even Teddy Roosevelt, the archetype of authenticity, accepted his status as a four-eyed city slicker, taking pleasure in his acceptance by the woodsmen and cowboys he felt were more authentic.
Which brings us to Jack Ohman's hilarious but insightful and devastating send-up.
There are so many levels on which this works that I hardly know where to start, but, of course, the first is that Millennials don't give a shit who you were before their parents were born, and they sure don't want to see you try to be hip now.
I don't know if Ohman did a lot of sleuthing before he drew this, but, as it happens, Bill and Hillary did kind of look like that in 1972, right down to the round, tinted glasses.
I'm tempted to assume Ohman saw this pic, but, then again, he wouldn't have to, because, by 1972, everybody looked like this.
In 1968, you might get beaten up for looking like that, if you wandered into the wrong place. That diner scene in "Easy Rider" was not spun from whole cloth.
But there was a transformation happening in those years, and I found this 2008 Salon article about Hillary Clinton's place in that process both enlightening and confirming.
Like many of us who were college-age in 1968, she went through some serious changes, and there is nothing inauthentic about her experience. I've often cautioned high school kids to look closely at the background of those pictures of Woodstock, because, while the long-haired naked hippies caught the photographer's eye, you can see that most of the people there looked like Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfus in "American Graffiti."
Similarly, while I knew people who dropped out of school to go work for political causes, and some others who went off with the Berrigans to pour blood on draft files, I knew more like Hillary Rodham who simply pitched in on whatever could happen within the system, armed with a new, stronger allegiance to social justice.
As noted in that article, she was no longer president of the campus chapter of Young Republicans, but she hadn't joined SDS, either. Tellingly, she wrote to a friend, “I guess you can say I am becoming more liberal, but what does ‘more’ mean when you start from nothing?”
Her speech as Class of 1969's valedictorian at Wellesley is revelatory because such speeches were, in those days, one of two things: Either a standard-issue milquetoast honor-student speech or a barnburner that had parents and alumnae storming out in fury.
I doubt anyone stormed out over this.
But she had worked for Gene McCarthy and, while she wasn't in Grant Park when all hell broke loose at the 1968 Democratic Convention, she did go down there to see it first hand. And, four years later, she worked for George McGovern.
If you think everyone in that era was either throwing Molotov cocktails or serving in Vietnam, she doesn't fit the image of the era.
But she wasn't a sell-out and she didn't have her head in the sand.
Still, as Lee Judge suggests, working within the system doesn't resonate in an election cycle where the system is on trial, or with a new generation that is not willing to give it any more time.
It will be interesting to see how this continues to unfold.
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