Meanie For President
Newt says she's nasty.
Geffen says she's ambitious.
The name-calling part of the presidential campaign is clearly in full swing. Next thing you know, someone will tell us she's not pretty enough to be president, and maybe that will be "news," too. After ambitious and nasty, could ugly be far behind?
Is this really the best the Clinton critics can do?
If Hillary Clinton were running for Miss Congeniality, she'd have reason to fear the latest rounds of criticism being lobbed at her and her campaign. "Miss United States" may not be in her grasp, but so what?
Since when is being "nice" the basis for being president? Since when does the nicest candidate win?
As Newt surely can tell you, politics is not a nice business. It does not reward those who can't take the heat, won't throw the mud back, or are lacking in either toughness or ambition.
Truth be told, you have to be frightfully ambitious to be willing to put up with the humiliations of being a presidential candidate, and more than a little nasty to be able to give as good as you get in the process. Those who aren't don't make it.
What comments like these reflect is a view of Hillary in which her biggest weakness is thought to be her personality: It's not that she's unqualified or inexperienced or wrong on the issues, but that people don't like and trust her.
There are at least two problems with this view of the world and how Hillary fits in it.
The first is that it doesn't accurately describe the universe of Democratic primary and caucus voters who will decide whether she makes it to the finals. In Democratic circles, the Clintons are heroes, not horrors.
Hillary is a rock star, not a witch. The problem she faces is not her personality, but her positions. Barring some new scandal, there is only one thing that could cost her the Democratic nomination, and that is the war in Iraq and her initial support for it.
The way many Democrats see it, it's not that she was nasty, but that she was wrong and won't admit to it. Maybe that's related to ambition, but the issue most Democrats focus on relates to the question of policy not personality.
The second problem with attacking Hillary's character is the potential of such attacks to backfire and win her more points than they cost her. I know plenty of women who don't like Hillary, but they like seeing her attacked for being overly ambitious or mean even less. Backlash voters, you can call them.
One of the biggest factors in improving Hillary's standing among women in her first Senate race was the perceived sexism in the attacks on her by her opponent. Criticizing a successful woman for being too ambitious is one of the oldest tricks in the book. What powerful woman hasn't faced that kind of attack? Show me a successful woman over the age of 40 who isn't considered, at least by male critics, to be "difficult."
If you want to help Hillary win support among women, just keep calling her names. The more you attack her like this, the more you humanize her.
Sticks and stones aren't the only things that can hurt you. Name-calling isn't as innocent as the nursery rhyme suggests. But it depends on what the names are and who's making the attack. "Hillary the Hawk" may not be electable, but that won't be because she's "ambitious" or even "mean" — particularly not when it's male moguls and much-hated Republicans who are doing the name-calling.
Thanks, Newt.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/susa...olumnsName=ses
"A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself."
Tullius Cicero (106-43 BC)
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Originally Posted by Gaffer
