Seventeen months after she sat regally in her New York living room and calmly declared: “I’m in and I’m in to win,” Hillary Clinton stands on a stage in a stifling hot shed in South Dakota, coughing and spluttering, as her daughter, Chelsea, grabs the microphone from her hand to take over the show.
“A long campaign,” the former First Lady chokes out between sips of water. Her husband, red-faced and exhausted – and having just apologised for another angry outburst in front of reporters – looks on wistfully at the final rally of his wife’s presidential bid, an endeavour that has been transformed from an inevitable juggernaut into a costly train wreck.
It was an extraordinary moment, exactly five months after the first contest in Iowa, to see the former First Family in the dying moments of the longest primary campaign in history, a gruelling journey across America that was meant to end in a Clinton restoration and has instead bought a very different inevitability: defeat at the hands of Barack Obama.
Thankfully, there will be no Clinton Part Deux in the White House. This country, and the fine shape it is now in, has been led by two families since 1988. I wanted a bumper sticker that said “No more Bushes, no more Clintons.”
We are not a monarchy where we choose people based on their blood connection to previous rulers.
That said, I am tremendously disappointed at the two choices left. McCain, an aging, angry Republican, versus a well-spoken, but inexperienced (can you say Dan Quayle) senator.
I may just vote for Obama in the hopes that a completely new vision, coupled with adult leadership in the House and Senate, will not provide too great a risk for the country.
It’s time to turn Iraq back over to the folks it belongs to (and who, by the way, hate us) and start spending some of the billions of dollars we spend there on repairing our roads, building some schools and heck, maybe even invest in some technology that will replace our dependency on oil.
If nothing else it will be a pleasure to hear a President who can actually put a sentence together without the tortured syntax of the current one.
How can a guy be in politics as long as W and still be such a miserable public speaker? I’m not a hate Bush guy, but listening to him speak is akin to a root canal.
Obama is just another liberal socalist politicion. Can’t go there.
Me I will write in Ron Paul.
Democrats had to choose between feminism and racism as a natural consequence of their politics. It has been amusing to an independent. Now that the options are on the table for each Party, the real campaign may begin. We’ll see.
Or it could be that patriarchy triumphed after all. I haven’t heard the simple country bishop of New Hampshire’s opinion on this yet.