Clinton Obama Who Cares?

Liberals are all twisted about the debates and the Internets are abuzz with foot-stamping and clucking that by a slim majority takes Hillary Clinton to task for being "mean." How encouraging. I don't give a flying fuck about anything short of the nomination and general election, but there are a few things here that bear examination.

First, Clinton is a mean person. And that's good. Policies don't get made from rainbows and breathy wishes and happy thoughts. Nor are they fought for and won by overly-serious, pedantic stiffs whose rhetoric of hope and unity is belied by their thoroughly uninspiring delivery. There's a real trick to be pulled off here: Clinton can make the streets run with blood if she can get elected; she could purge our government of the moronic lackeys of the held-over Republican Revolution and the Bush Era. But, can she win the election? She, after all, has a vagina, and that's strike one in America. She's also, as we have said, deemed "mean" by liberals who live in Harry Potter fantasy land. Bush is Voldemort, we get it. Slag off.

The biggest question, though, is what will become of Barack Obama. Personally, I am tired of his halting-yet-deliberate delivery and his Kerry-esque inability to make a point in less than 5 minutes. Voters have shown, twice, that they won't deliver super majorities to Democratic candidates who are long-winded, high-minded, and authoritative. Obama is frightening for two reasons: he speaks in platitudes and cliches, with no details backing the easy assumptions he leaves with his audiences; and his rhetoric of hope and unity feels for all the world like code-speak for "let bygones be bygones"--in other words, there is no reason, yet, to believe he would tear up, root and branch, the perverted government Bush will leave behind. Obama has to avoid the appearance of being an angry black man (again, because American culture demands it--thank you, Sidney Poitier!) and he expends so much energy keeping his voice calm and his smile plastered on his face that his words all come out as cliches as he lapses into a smirky monotone.

Hillary Clinton, it still seems, has too much baggage and too many enemies in the press corps to win the nomination. Barack Obama is too moderate and uninspiring to win an election. What to do, what to do?