But let's look at the dilemma that Hillary Clinton is in. As we watch her "inevitability" meme vanish in the wind, and her voice is raised ever more often, the mask of "likeability" that she's tried so mightily to cultivate has begun to drop; or perhaps the protective shell she's used so much over the years against the constant verbal feces that have been so relentlessly thrown at her from the right.
But perhaps it's a no-win situation for her this year. She can't possibly match the transformational quality that suffuses Barack Obama's candidacy, because let's face it: for all that we are a long way from an end to misogyny in this country, white women have done far better over the last thirty years than have black men. And if she were to run the kind of campaign John Edwards is running, she'd be branded as "too soft" -- something Edwards has faced as well, except he doesn't seem to care.
After making my customary weekend list of things I wanted to get done yesterday and finishing my yoga practice, I made the mistake of putting on the TV yesterday just in time to watch Punkinhead, Andrea Mitchell, and David Gregory discussing whether Elizabeth Edwards' omnipresence, and habit of making points that her husband either neglected or chose not to make, is a problem for him. And there you have the new John Edwards meme from the Heathers in the media: he's pussy-whipped. Remember, this is coming from a panel that features a woman who's been a journalist for more decades than most of Obama's voters have been alive, one whose endless face-lifts and botox don't make her black leather jacket look any more ridiculous. If Hillary is the new Bob Dole for these morons, then they're trying to fashion Elizabeth Edwards, with her unabashedly dowdy clothes and suburban soccer mom hair, into the new Hillary. Be afraid, men....be very afraid.
Disgusted with this, I switched over to C-SPAN just in time for John Edwards' appearance at the Franco-American Centre in Manchester, New Hampshire. Barack Obama may HAVE Oprah, but John and Elizabeth Edwards ARE Oprah.
After Edwards' second-place finish in Iowa, the family of Nataline Sarkisyan got in touch with the campaign and offered to help. Yesterday they spoke on his behalf in Manchester:
The Lakey family, much derided by the likes of Tucker Carlson who is so invested in the status quo that he's willing to attack a child whose intestines were sucked out by a pool drain and will need care for the rest of her life, have been on the campaign trail with Edwards for a while. Now the Sarkisyans have come on board. Nataline Sarkisyan gives a name and a face to the very real consequences of insurance company practices, illustrating better than any speech ever could why you cannot play nice with these people. The Sarkisyans are not experienced public speakers, but it would be hard to find a speechwriter more effective than what you see in the above video.
There's no way Hillary Clinton could run a town meeting like this without negatively impacting her "I have balls too" need to out-guy the guys. Perhaps if she wasn't hamstrung by the thankless task of trying to be both genders at the same time, she wouldn't have felt it necessary for her surrogates to strike this kind of low blow against both Edwards and the Sarkisyan family:
John Edwards angrily took on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton at two news conferences in a row on Sunday, saying that her campaign “doesn’t seem to have a conscience.”
Mr. Edwards was responding to a comment from Jay Carson, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, who suggested that “the references in Senator Clinton’s speeches are about people she has actually helped and changes she has actually made, not stories she’s pulled from the newspaper and included in her stump,” Mr. Carson wrote in an E-mail message.
Mr. Carson’s comment was in reference to an emotional town hall event Mr. Edwards held in Manchester early Sunday afternoon, featuring an appearance by the parents of Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient who died in December after her insurance company denied her a liver transplant. Mr. Edwards had recently incorporated the story into his stump speech as a criticism of insurance companies.
Speaking at a news conference after the Manchester event, Mr. Edwards responded to Mr. Carson’s comment when a reporter read it to him.
“The Sarkisyans contacted me because they believe I’m the kind of president who will actually fight for their daughter,” Mr. Edwards said. “People who have been through these difficult times against entrenched, powerful moneyed interests – they get it. They get it in a serious way. They’re not looking for somebody who’ll make deals.”
Then after spending an hour on his campaign bus, en route to his next event in Keene, Mr. Edwards called another news conference – before his next event had even started.
“This campaign doesn’t seem to have a conscience,” he said, adding that he had been thinking about the comment from the Clinton campaign. “The more I thought about it, the idea that somehow everything is about them, I mean, it’s an indication that they have no conscience about what’s at stake here. These families are who this is about. It’s not about them, nor is it about me. It’s about whether we’re going to actually stand up and fight for these people and how much we care about them.”
It's difficult enough for John Edwards to operate like this, given that his looks seem to give supposedly heterosexual men in the media the vapors. You have to give him credit for being comfortable enough in his own skin to continue to run these "human interest" town meetings, which always include long question-and-answer sessions and which always have a sizable role for his wife. He's not emerging from these unscathed, but then he doesn't have to prove he's as tough as the bellicose bullies in the Republican Party either.
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