- ‹ previous
- 3576 of 8813
- next ›
Debate's Final Moment - Transformative?
The Clinton campaign is really pushing the final bit of yesterday's debate (coverage of the full debate here) as some kind of transformative moment. Seconds after the debate ended, Clinton's communications director Howard Wolfson sent out a short email saying this:
What we saw in the final moments in that debate is why Hillary Clinton is the next President of the United States. Her strength, her life experience, her compassion. She's tested and ready. It was the moment she retook the reins of this race and showed women and men why she is the best choice.
Just after midnight, the campaign sent out video of the moment. It's below. And today's Morning HUBdate (an email sent daily to supporters) began, "If You Watch One Thing Today: In the final moments of last night's debate, Hillary demonstrated her strength, life experience and compassion."
But here's the thing. That handshake was seen by some in the media last night as a valedictory. It was a composed, graceful moment that humanized Clinton (and Obama) and showed that beneath their politicians' veneers, they are just fundamentally decent human beings. But the press saw the beginning of the end for Clinton. And indeed, it could be seen as Clinton laying the groundwork for a graceful exit. Keith Olbermann speculated that it was a capitulation, a statement that she is ready to be a VP.
I don't think it was a capitulation, but I do think it was a concession in some way that she is tired of fighting and attacking, especially because her attacks on Obama haven't been working and the race has slipped away from her. It was also an acknowledgment of the fatigue that the campaign season puts a person under.
I wonder if the campaign realized that that the closing moment was dangerous, so they immediately leapt to spin it to their advantage. And because everyone was focusing on that handshake, they included the minute or two beforehand in which Clinton talked about injured vets.
Draw your own conclusions. As a nation, we've already spent fifteen years psychoanalyzing the Clintons; looks like we're not done yet.
Or the needle in the ball of cotton????
Living in France, I slept through the debate and read about it the next day. A final standing ovation for Hillary Clinton was mentioned but when I went to look for this "moment" on CNN's blog, it was "cut off". Hillary fared no better on French news sites. Of course, their sexist tendencies ran rampant during the recent president-ial election over here. What is particularly dismaying is the role that women play in the "hobbling" of female candidates, particularly the way certain female journa-lists seem to want to score points by baiting female candidates. The other problem is the presence of the "female eunuchs" beside the male candidates. Michelle Obama is not only promoting her husband but she's demoting female candidates by the model of her behavior. I wonder if she isn't the one who helped her husband lift the line from feminist June Jordan's poem for one of his recent speeches: "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
Or maybe it was Tony Morrison or Oprah. Saddening that one of them wouldn't have had him cite his source.
Anybody feeling a bit silly, now, for having viewed Sen. Clinton's closing as conciliatory or gracious -- now that, in retrospect, we see that it was a transparent pander to be portrayed in a positive light before opening their "kitchen sink" negative attack strategy?