What Hillary Should Say Now

YES! Thank you for this! This is exactly how I have been feeling and what I have been thinking. How dare the Republicans--or any party--think that women will vote for their party simply because the veep candidate happens to be a woman. It is cheap, and she is being used--and she is complicit in that. As I read on another site, she is hooker to McCain's pimp. Harsh, but true.

another

"For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. ???Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other???? he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

A favorite theme, said Salil Mehra, now a law professor at Temple University, were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. Mr. Obama???s case in point: his wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved ???The Brady Bunch??? so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama???s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. ???Take Barack Obama, there???s a good-looking guy,??? he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

Challenging Assumptions

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton???s efforts to reach across the aisle.

???On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,??? Mr. Obama said.

But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. ???For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn???t that kind of class,??? said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

For one thing, Mr. Obama???s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

???I remember thinking, ???You???re offending my liberal instincts,??? ??? Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled."

another excerpt

"At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field."

Formillers: I think you sound like an idiot...I think Irish1863 made a fine point and so have many others and you take things out of context. Also you put too many words into a sentence to make yourself sound smart.

Hey, 4gates23, she said nothing at all bad about Sen. Clinton. Read the piece again so you're sure YOU know what you're talking about.

I love this piece.
I think it puts not only Hillary, but her DEM female supporters on the hotseat to rescue the country during this campaign from four more years of right-wing rule.

Hillary and her legions put themselves and all of us there by playing the "gender" card so masterfully to prolong a campaign that Hillary lost in IOWA and rescued with tears in NH and finally won meaningless primaries with gender-baiting, attacks on Obama and the media....sound familiar.

So the REPS just took Hillary's tactics to its logical extension and by doing so, have really challenged all the women of America in a similar way that Hillary challenged DEM women in Denver. (Were you doing this for me or were you doing this for real). All women in America now must be confronted with a similar conundrum as exquisitely presented by the author of this article. Is the typical American woman willing to put gender ahead of her agenda.....her family's agenda, her children's agenda, her country's agenda, this planet's agenda?

I wouldn't think so, but I've been wrong many times and the REPS have kept winning the White House, so they clearly know something I don't. So we'll see.

I love this piece.
I think it puts not only Hillary, but her DEM female supporters on the hotseat to rescue the country during this campaign from four more years of right-wing rule.

Hillary and her legions put themselves and all of us there by playing the "gender" card so masterfully to prolong a campaign that Hillary lost in IOWA and rescued with tears in NH and finally won meaningless primaries with gender-baiting, attacks on Obama and the media....sound familiar.

So the REPS just took Hillary's tactics to its logical extension and by doing so, have really challenged all the women of America in a similar way that Hillary challenged DEM women in Denver. (Were you doing this for me or were you doing this for real). All women in America now must be confronted with a similar conundrum as exquisitely presented by the author of this article. Is the typical American woman willing to put gender ahead of her agenda.....her family's agenda, her children's agenda, her country's agenda, this planet's agenda?

I wouldn't think so, but I've been wrong many times and the REPS have kept winning the White House, so they clearly know something I don't. So we'll see.

Am I to assume Patti is a vegan? She may not see toughness in a woman hunting but let's face it, we all have to eat and for those of use who are omnivores, it does involved the death of an animal of some sort.

Oh, wait!! I get it!!! Us girls are supposed to be afraid to do the hard things and get all of life handed to us in sanitized little packages with no effort or hardship on our part. Everything from our food to our children, at our convenience.

As I always say, I'll never understand the moral compass of a party who will chain themselves to a tree, jump in front of a bullet to save a bunny and yet still think it is okay to vaccuum the brains out of an unborn child.

Go go Patti, take the easy path in life...we all know where that leads...

Beautiful, eloquent and well written! Hillary Clinton can change the national election. I hope she joins the fray. The country needs her strength, support and intelligence! The women of this country need her toughness now!

Your article deftly over-emphasizes Palin's "hunter-gatherer" skills and eloquently under-emphasises her mothering qualities -- those same qualities for which you are such an ardent apologist. And for some reason, when Palin talks about Obama's lack of executive experience, it's "snippy", but when Obama says that McCain "doesn't get it", that's OK?

Excuse me.

This is very well written and beautifully expressed. The writer, Ronald Reagan's daughter, certainly speaks for me. As to "liberal media bias..." isn't it about time that the conservative media establishment owned their superiority in controlling the media and dropped this pretense of being the underdog? The media I read is still pre-occupied with good journalism and representing all perspectives (this is the OPINION section, BTW, and MSNBC has featured many different columnists here) while the Murdoch-run media empire only illustrates the liberal perspective when it represents an opportunity for the Fox News stooges to verbally beat up on the speaker.

Yes, I hope Hillary will, through a reasoned message which she is so capable of, communicate how wrong this person is for American women and America in general. I must say though, why is any American surprised by the Republican's choice of Palin? After all, it's the party who gave us that renowned intellectual featherweight George W. Bush. Americans who vote with their bibles in hand have consistently demonstrated that they don't really care what their man or women in office does - immoral, amoral, etc. - as long as they receive their regular dose of religious lip service.

While we don't know as much as we would like about Obama, we do know enough about John McCain and Palin to vote for the Obama ??? Biden ticket to prevent a repeat of the last eight years wherein America was grievously wounded at home and abroad by the leadership of the Republican Party. Yes, Hillary, give her hell!

And, for all of those out there who are backing off because Obama said, ???leave her family out of it???, he didn???t mean you dummy. Now is not the time to be cowed by sacred cows. She put herself in the position she is in, a very public place, and can easily be skewered by her position and record on abortion, the environment, ethics, her claim to being a maverick, her relationship to big business, her religious views, etc. ??? all of which are fair game. Imagine her getting the call at 2:00 A.M. in the morning. I could have been very comfortable with Hillary getting that call, and now am with Obama ??? but this right-wing bible thumping ?????????, thanks, but no thanks! America doesn???t need any more self-righteous hypocrites making our future any darker than it already has become under the Bush administration and Republican Congress.

Could Sarah Palin be even more appealing to Hillary's male voters than Hillary - or Obama? And could that have been the idea all along? Seems to me that blue collar men could, and maybe should, be the swing voters this time....just asking...

I understand that the Democratic party is hoping (beyond hope?) that you will come out against Sarah Palin and I truly do hope, myself, that you will NOT. Yes, a year ago, when people were buzzing about your potential race to the white-house, I had a sinking feeling that there was NO way any American public would allow for it. I had no idea that the DEMOCRATS, would hold and foist upon us such misobynistic views and oust the person with the more popular votes only because she was a woman. It has me completely frustrated and, if Sarah Palin is given the same treatment that Howard Dean, et al, have beccome so proficient at, we may never see a female president in my lifetime or even that of my young-adult childres. Am I concerned that John MCCain has chosen a woman as his runnning mate? I followed all sides of this election process and I noted that both Palin AND Sebelius were high-up on the "McCain" short list for veep and, so, I decided to inform myself about both women, along with other potential mates. Though I would have preferred Sebelius (or, against all odds, YOU) as his veep, I have found that this "liberal, incependent voter" can get behind McCain. Surely, I appreciate both candidates' experience over that of Barack Obama! Biden MAY be able to help Obama along, were Obama to actually win the seat, but (and it's a big but) Obama would have to open himself up and actually LISTEN TO SOMEONE OTHER THAN HIMSELF. Obama is not the type of man to do this and, so, he is doomed to fail in position as President-- just as he has failed as senator and "community organiser". His organising seems to have been much more geared for the financial gain of the slumlord, Rezko, thsn it was a positive thing for any poor people in his city of Chicago. It's deplorable, how he operates.
With all that is known (by those like me who actually do their homework) about Obama, there's not one thing that anyone wuld now way which could cause me to vote for him. Had YOU been his veep pick, I would have had to vote against you.
Now, I thought for all of these months, as I realised that the fix was in for Obama, I could still write-in YOUR name as my presidential pick. I realise now that I cannot do that. My one vote is too precious for me to essentially throw it away only to make a point. So, you will not get it this time.
But, Hillary; I want to be able to vote for you in the (very near) future. And, I want for the American people, as a whole, to finally be okay with a woman in the white-house. It seems to me that getting Sarah Palin elected with John McCain may be the only thing I can do to ease the country's collective worries and bigotries as far as this is concerned. So, with a lighter heart, I am supporting McCain/Palin..., and I hope you will, too.
At the very least, I hope you will not campaign against Palin as she is, first and foremost, a woman. And, Hilary, women should and certainly DO count.