Anyone else would drop out

I know that many bloggers have rallied around Hillary Clinton in the wake of the disgusting fratboyism at MSNBC and elsewhere. But being the target of misogynistic attacks and language doesn't somehow magically turn Mrs. Clinton into a noncorporatist, progressive candidate.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I see her talk about creating good jobs at good wages, I want to shout at the TV, "Then why do you cozy up to the very companies that want to send those very jobs overseas?" She gives lip service to "retraining", but says nothing about the nature of the jobs for which already highly skilled IT workers should "retrain." Granted, she's in a difficult position, because she either has to run on her words or run on her (and let's face it, Bill's) record. And for someone who refuses to ever admit that she was wrong, she has a long track record of supporting policies that she now repudiates on the stump without ever using the words "wrong" or "mistake."

So in the aftermath of yesterday's routs in Wisconsin and Hawaii for Barack Obama, I have to ask: Just who's running on "words"?

Ignoring her crushing loss in Wisconsin to rival Barack Obama, Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton pressed her case Tuesday that the Illinois senator offers little more than talk.

"It's about picking a president who relies not just on words, but on work, hard work, to get America back to work," Clinton said at a labor rally here. "Someone who's not just in the speeches business."

Aside from the fact that this sounds an awful lot like a "Lazy Negro (sic) slur against Obama, who's the one who's really in the speeches business here?

Last year at Yearly Kos, while John Edwards was asking the other two candidates to join him in renouncing lobbyist money, Hillary Clinton was up on the stage saying that lobbyists are Americans too. And NOW, having driven the populist candidate out of the race, she's finally gotten religion?

As someone old enough to remember when my mother was the only woman with kids in the neighborhood who worked outside the home, I would have liked to have been able to support "the first viable woman candidate." But to vote for, as Melissa might say, "the vagina-American" candidate, because she "looks like me" is no different from white guys refusing to vote for a woman or black man. Would I support a man who was running a campaign the way Clinton's is run and has Clinton's record on war and outsourcing?

Again:

And is Clinton even viable at this point? Yesterday Barack Obama even cut into what's believed to be Clinton's core constituency -- lower-income voters and women. Last night he was in Clinton's firewall state giving a victory speech in front of an intimate group of 20,000 people. Momentum may be overrated, but when you have two "transformational" candidates, and one of them is racking up states by such huge margins, the element of Something Bigger Going On cannot be ignored.

Clinton's biggest problem is that the transformational nature of her candidacy is by definition muted by the inescapable fact that a Hillary Clinton presidency is not something entirely new, and it's not uncharted territory. We've been here before. Assuming that the Obama Train continues its relentless roll into Denver and wraps things up by then, the irony of the Clinton candidacy will be that the first viable woman candidates's aspirations were largely thwarted by the very husband whose own departing popularity ratings in 2000, after surviving eight years of Republican witch hunts, was still higher than George W. Bush's have been for most of his presidency. Bill Clinton was supposed to be her biggest asset, and it seems he's been her biggest liability, for all that people DO remember his presidency fondly. He's become a liability because without the presidency and the ability to formulate policy as a backdrop, and when the campaign's back is against the wall, all of Bill Clinton's flaws have come to the fore -- the "It's all about me" narcissism. The need for attention and adulation. The relentlessness that's no longer cloaked in a smile and a lower lip curled so fetchingly under his teeth.

Imagine if John Edwards had decided to tough it out longer. Imagine if he had woken up today after double-digit losses in the last ten state contests. Do you think he'd be vowing to fight this till the convention, figuring that the party hacks would give him the nomination?

Again:

It's entirely possible that Hillary Clinton has it in her to be a great president and Barack Obama may be a terrible one. I may have decided to support Obama, but I'm riding on the train's steps, not knocking back a few with the Obamaniacs in the bar car. I'm not 100% sold and I'm not a true believer. But after eight years of the ugliest Administration in my lifetime, with a president and vice-president who operate in secrecy, regard themselves as entitled to hold power rather than that power being a sacred trust and a privilege, who will do anything, including thwarting the will of the people to win elections, and who attack everyone who disagrees with them, the last thing I want is another Administration with a similar sense of entitlement, no matter how marginally they claim to be on my side.