Digesting Hillary

The Sunday Herald published Poor Hillary: right gender, wrong woman and maybe it takes a foreigner to give some sense to the ongoing Hillary machine:

A Hillary Clinton presidency could have been historic: I get it. Nevertheless, you are reminded of the difference between necessary and sufficient when you hear her issuing threats of military action against Iran, assaulting her rival for failures of faux-patriotism, or pandering to any possible demographic demanding a little light, discreet, pandering.

Her campaign has been dogged, but unpleasant. Senator Obama has been dull - but Senator Clinton has been dirty. The usual version says that this is merely "the Clintons" doing what they do. They fight hard; they never give up; their sheer persistence is part of their charm and their legend. But that bald statement of cussed implacability lays Hillary (so to speak) bare (so to speak).

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You knew she wanted it obsessively. But even with the history of gender-oppression hanging over every statement, something was very wrong.

There was the hint, first, of entitlement. She seemed to say that in some sense she had earned the presidency. Dynasty, for her, was always more than soft soap. Equally, it appeared that claiming the White House "in her own right" had more to do with the psycho-dynamics of a marriage than with the needs of a nation. You could call that worrying.

Back over here, Bob Herbert at The New York Times scores two bullseyes (if a bit less outlandishly did Ian Bell in The Sunday Herald):

I don’t know if Senator Obama can win the White House. No one knows. But to deliberately convey the idea that most white people — or most working-class white people — are unwilling to give an African-American candidate a fair hearing in a presidential election is a slur against whites.
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But it’s one thing to lack class and a sense of grace, quite another to deliberately try and wreck the presidential prospects of your party’s likely nominee — and to do it in a way that has the potential to undermine the substantial racial progress that has been made in this country over many years.

I say let Hillary run out the game but I only if she can do so with more grace than she has shown since before Pennsylvania. It is not about whether she should run or not, but if she should campaign in the way she has or not.