Here nigel, an OP-ED from NYT, which endorsed Hillary. Go figure why the author starts out by supporting Hillary but then in the end has doubts about her victory in Ohio and suggests that if she looses it is because of her campaign staff and not her.
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Op-Ed Columnist
Hillary, Buckeye Girl
By GAIL COLLINS
ZANESVILLE, Ohio
If Hillary Clinton were a state, she’d be Ohio.
This is a no-frills kind of place, suspicious of glamour. Barack Obama’s promise to make politics cool again doesn’t necessarily resonate here. Eight presidents came from Ohio, and the coolest was William McKinley.
When I grew up in Cincinnati, we always rooted for the players who worked really, really hard, not the ones who were so talented they made everything look easy. If Hillary were a baseball player, she’d be Pete Rose. Minus, of course, the unfortunate gambling issues and the tendency to scratch inappropriate places while standing in the infield.
So there she was Wednesday here in Zanesville, holding an economic summit in a gymnasium with a huge table stuffed full of participants, including the founder of Weight Watchers; former Senator John Glenn, the heroic astronaut who once put the entire Democratic presidential convention to sleep with his keynote speech; and the governor of Ohio, a vice presidential hopeful who looks like an unidentified passer-by.
“We have to start acting like Americans again, and roll up our sleeves and start solving our problems,” Clinton said, launching one of the least-exciting discussions of economic development in memory.
There she sat, one of the best-known human beings on the planet. The first woman ever to be a serious United States presidential contender; the face that launched a thousand books; a former first lady, current U.S. senator and survivor of the most famous sex scandal of the century. And yet she has managed to become the boring candidate in this primary.
This is one of the great anti-glamour stories in history. How could Ohio not relate?
If Hillary can win this one — and if she doesn’t, she is as cooked as reheated risotto — it will be because people here worry that Barack Obama is getting show-offy.
It’s not his fault. Contrary to rumor, he is not planting those people who faint from excitement at his rallies. Nevertheless, they continue to topple, and by now Barack is so used to this particular crisis that it has become almost a part of the rally routine. “If we have an E.M.T. in the house, I think somebody got faint,” he said calmly when a woman keeled over in front of the stage in Cincinnati. “They just need a little water and some juice.”
At the debate on Tuesday, Clinton followed through on her promise to hit Obama hard on campaign fliers that she said mischaracterized her positions on trade and health care. She had been billing this confrontation in terms usually reserved for professional wrestling grudge matches. But earlier that day, a right-wing radio commentator at a John McCain rally denounced Obama in terms so over the top that McCain felt obliged to apologize. After that, a sloppy quotation mark in a Nafta pamphlet sounded pretty petty.
What’s the Clinton campaign come to when she can’t get equal denunciation time from a right-wing nut job?
Back around Debate 10 — lo those many debates ago — Hillary routinely wiped the floor with Barack. He was reluctant and stumbling. She was confident and presidential. Then, as Adam Nagourney pointed out in The Times this week, he suddenly evolved. Now, he’s better than she is — calm and witty at crucial junctures, always to the point, never obsessing on the small stuff. After this week’s Debate 20, Hillary’s people gloated over the fact that Barack had said he agreed with her entirely on several key points, as if this was an admission of weakness rather than the key to his campaign — the promise to find whatever consensus there is and build on it.
If Hillary is stumbling, it may be because there just isn’t any good path to take. Nobody wants a bloodbath, and fighting against the first possible African-American president can be as tricky as going after the first possible woman. Still, she might have been able to handle all that, and the fact that he is a product of Kansas and Hawaii and Kenya, of Christians and Muslims, of a single mom on food stamps and Harvard Law, if he didn’t also turn out to have the best learning curve in political history.
You don’t often see a candidate on a trajectory like Obama’s, and at some point it will inevitably head down again. But until it does, even the original Bill Clinton would have a hard time beating him.
If things don’t go well for Hillary over the next few weeks, some of her consultants may need retraining for a promising new career in, say, motel management, but here’s what I hope she understands. She’s done fine. And she’d probably have won the nomination walking away if Barack hadn’t picked this moment to mutate into BARACK!
You do your best, and if things don’t work out, it just wasn’t your time. Life isn’t always fair.
All of which Ohio understands very well.
nytimes.com |
