I’m just not into NAFTA, not into the Patriot Act, not into the Iraq war, and Clinton’s record on these things does not reflect my politics.

I’m also Jewish and not an Israel supporter, so I’m used to
being called self-hating for what I consider to be objective political views.

I’m not saying I won’t vote for HRC against McCain. I’m only saying that the reason I was for Kucinich was not because he is a man or because he is white. My favorite candidate now is Cynthia McKinney and she is a woman.

http://www.womensmediacenter.com/ex/020108.html

I think the focus on gender would only be fair if we focused equally on race. Which we won’t. And, of course, *nobody* is talking about class. Except my candidate who dropped out.

(And yes: Katie Roiphe is a twit.)

Good luck to you as you make your decision. I’ll happily fall in line with whomever the eventual nominee is. They’re both quality people, and either one will be a good president, and I hope, a great president.

Half-way through the Clinton era, I attended an academic conference in Washington DC, and in my anger at the failures of the administration’s effort to get its health insurance plan through Congress, combined with its war against Big Tobacco (not a bad war if the other priorities are in order), I staged a protest. I lit a cigar and smoked it as I walked around the White House. The streets were deserted on this misty Sunday morning, and no one noticed the protest. Two years later, the nation would learn that cigars have a different symbolic meaning for Bill (and as a reader of Melville I should have been able to figure that one out for myself). In my despair, I turned to Hunter S. Thompson’s Better Than Sex: Confessions of a Political Junkie in which Bill Clinton is described as no more than a bat boy in Nixon’s League of Evil.

After Bill was elected in 1992, my employer and professor took the office staff of her museum project out to lunch to celebrate. She likened the coming reign to Kennedy’s Camelot, which she was old enough to remember. I was the oldest of the group and was not yet in pre-school when Kennedy had his brains blown out by the most remarkable bullet in U.S. History, and thus much of her enthusiasm was lost on her audience. That part that remained became buried in the successes of Clinton (and later Tony Blair) in getting through programs that had been proposed by Ronald Reagan (and Maggie Thatcher). These New Liberals were not giving us the world we sought.

I’m trying very hard not to dislike Hillary Clinton and I like her better than her hubby. My animosity stems not from Boomer envy, but from the recognition that real and lasting change in the political landscape of post-Reagan America does not appear likely behind her leadership. My ballot came in the mail yesterday and I have two weeks to decide whether Clinton or Obama gets one more insignificant vote. In 2000, it was easier to get excited about Bill Bradley, but Super Tuesday finished his run.