Wednesday, January 9, 2008

There's No Crying in Politics! Unless an Onion is Nearby?

For the love of all that is good, if I have to hear about Hillary's bawling fit of hysterics one more time I'm going to have my own sort of fit. Come on people, she found herself unexpectedly choked up. I was reading a book the other night and suddenly found my eyes misting when one of the main characters died. Perhaps the State should fire me for being such an emotional puddle?

In fact, if I have to hear one more time about how Hillary has no connection to people on a human level, well...I don't know what I will do on that one. The bottom line is, she can't win. I don't mean she can't win the election. I mean it doesn't matter what she does because *someone* is going to give her grief. Hillary is too harsh. Hillary has no charisma. Hillary shows no emotion. No, wait, Hillary shows too much emotion. No, wait, wait, Hillary only shows crocodile tears that have been carefully calculated far in advance in order to maximize the effect and surely she must have had a slice of onion in her pocket to achieve the feat.

There are a slew of articles out there about her massive meltdown. I like the article Hillary and the political crying game at Guardian Unlimited because it points out some obvious facts that seem to be glossed over in the mania. (1) Thankfully, Guardian finds it unlikely that the tears won her New Hampshire. (2) They point out the obvious double standard that is at work here. "A man can cry because you don't expect him to; a woman can't because it's just too predictable."

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm not a big Hillary fan, but I completely agree. The overanalysis of her campaign is not completely because she's a woman, but that's about 90% of it. I don't want to hear about her clothes or her emotions. I want to hear about her politics, end of story. How she went from the leader to a "comeback kid" in four days is just another example of how bizarrely obsessive the press has become.

habladora said...

Yeah, even my beloved NPR was talking non-stop Hillary's "amazing comeback - it must have been the tears" all day yesterday. The phrase "pulled back the veneer" was actually used when talking about the 'sniffle effect.'

But obsessive is too kind an adjective for the press, I think. I think that the press is lazy and greedy. It is cheaper and easier to have someone on to talk about clothes and misty eyes than it is to look into what candidates say they want, how their rhetoric lines up with their record, and to consider whether the policies they recommend would actually be beneficial.

Sigh.

Mächtige Maus said...

Hmmm...Pobre, maybe you should look into a new position in the press? That way you could rejoin the blogging world because surely it can't take all that long to report on a candidate's clothing.

I'm glad I missed NPR using the "pulled back the veneer" phrase. That surely would have caused the fit I mentioned.

I was watching the NBC nightly news the other night and in one segment they were reading some viewer comments about the election coverage. One person wrote in about the media craze and how thrilled they were that they got the outcome all wrong despite the efforts to sway the voters of New Hampshire. A woman lambasted them on just what I wrote about. A third person pointed out the discrepancy of press coverage between the Democratic outcome and John McCain, who above all could have been described as the comeback kid. I'll give NBC props for airing those public viewpoints since all of them slammed NBC just as much as any other media outlet.

Anonymous said...

Can major media just go away? Lately I've been starting to feel like CNN is a tabloid more than a news-reporting entity. And while I'm doing better with print journalism, I can't even read the op-ed's anymore because they tend to lead these crazy charges more than call them into question. Perhaps I can just put my head in the sand since I feel comfortable in my choice of candidate.

Anonymous said...

Talking about cheating ... check out the article at the following link!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/15/AR2008011501329.html

I could not believe it!
But I will say no more. will not spoil the surprise!

j.

habladora said...

Quite honestly,I think anyone who doesn't get watery eyes when thinking about what has happened to our country over the past few years should be out of the running. Rendition, torture, war - we should all be crying.

Having said that, I'm leaning towards supporting Obama right now - on the sole basis that he didn't vote for the war while Bush and Edwards did. I really do wish I could get a more thoughtful breakdown of their voting records and stated policies.

And J, I can't get to the article you mentioned from the above - so spoil away!