Hillary vs. Obama: It's a drawl!
Barack Obama commands respect while Hillary Clinton overacts. Plus: John Edwards' disappearing act, Mary Shelley debunked, and Ann Coulter's gender weirdness.
By Camille Paglia
Read more: Hillary Rodham Clinton, Camille Paglia, Ann Coulter, Britney Spears, Opinion, John Edwards, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama
March 14, 2007 | Nerves, nerves, nerves: The contenders in both parties for the 2008 presidential nomination have been acting like skittish race-track thoroughbreds rearing and shying as their handlers try to shove them into the gates. Each campaign is super-concerned about its candidate getting distracted, winded or making a crippling misstep.
What in tarnation was the Hillary Clinton camp thinking when it threw a tantrum about Hollywood producer David Geffen making a few critical remarks about her to a fagged-out media scold? Most people in this country have never heard of David Geffen and don't give a damn about whether or not he defects to Barack Obama.
I loved the way Obama's campaign handled the dust-up -- some nice sharp barbs from an underling followed by the candidate's lofty assertion of statesmanlike unconcern. It made me take Obama seriously as a candidate for 2008 (rather than 2012) for the first time. Despite the garish pop-ups of gossip about his botched investments and unpaid parking tickets, Obama has been gaining traction as a contender.
Hillary didn't help herself with her over-the-top sermon at the First Baptist Church in Selma, Alabama, two weeks ago. Her aping of a black Southern accent from the pulpit was so inept and patronizing that it should get a Razzie Award for Worst Performance of the Year. At times, it approached the Southern Gothic burlesque of Bette Davis chewing up the scenery in "Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte." Does Hillary Clinton have a stable or coherent sense of self? Or is everything factitious, mimed and scripted (like her flipping butch and femme masks) for expediency?
Of course, any Salon readers who still follow the mainstream media out of numbed habit will never have heard Hillary's most extreme flights of faux gemutlichkeit. All that Sunday, network radio news, for example, betrayed its liberal bias by running clips of only her noblest phrases. Heaven help any Republican who had made so lurid a gaffe! Fortunately, alternative media now exist: On his radio show that night, Matt Drudge ran huge, hilarious swatches of prophesyin' Hillary camping it up.
The blatant manipulations of the mainstream media are betrayed by the way that mercurial polling data has been relentlessly promoted about the candidates of both parties for more than a year. That material simply assesses name recognition in an ephemeral beauty contest. Thus we've had endless reports about Hillary and John McCain as front-runners, despite rampant dissatisfactions with them among members of their own parties. Now we're onto the challenger-with-momentum drama starring Obama and Rudy Giuliani, which may be equally short-lived.
Figures showing John Edwards trailing in the polls merely reflect his lack of publicity in the period leading up to the first big nationally televised debates, when most voters start to pay attention. Many Democrats like me who are leaning toward Edwards have to be dissatisfied with his marginalization by the mainstream media as well as with his recessiveness during the mastodon-on-mastodon tango between Hillary and Obama. At first I thought Edwards was shrewd to hold fire and pace himself to come on strong later, but this delay is starting to look like uncertainty.
Hence my unhappy surprise when Edwards, who has an attractively comprehensive social policy and strong oratorical skills, was the first to pull out of the scheduled August debate moderated by Fox News. What is this morbid obsession that liberals have with Fox? It's as if Democrats, pampered and spoiled by so many decades of the mainstream media trumpeting the liberal agenda, are so shaky in their convictions that they cannot risk an encounter with opposing views. Democrats have ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, the New York Times, Newsweek, Time and 98 percent of American humanities professors to do their bidding. But no, that's not enough -- every spark of dissent has to be extinguished with buckets of bile.
But Fox is certainly disingenuous with its absurd "fair and balanced" motto. Oh, come on, give it up! Why can't Fox honestly admit its conservative agenda, as do major radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, and simply argue that it represents a culturally necessary antidote to the omnipresent liberal line? Yet for Democratic presidential candidates, who will be assessed by voters for their ability to stand up to China, North Korea or al-Qaida, to run squealing from a Fox moderator as if he or she were a boogeyman with blood-dripping fangs makes the whole pack of them look like simpering wusses. Dennis Kucinich was quite right to express his scorn and offer to debate anyone anywhere and under any sponsorship. Nice job of skewering the sacred cow!
Next page: Is Ann Coulter truly oblivious to her gender weirdness?