{"id":2176,"date":"2008-01-14T09:45:15","date_gmt":"2008-01-14T09:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/14\/the-clinton-conundrum\/"},"modified":"2008-01-14T09:45:15","modified_gmt":"2008-01-14T09:45:15","slug":"the-clinton-conundrum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/14\/the-clinton-conundrum\/","title":{"rendered":"The Clinton Conundrum"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a lot of people linking to this exhaustive recounting of Chris Matthews’s unhealthy fixation on Hillary Clinton<\/a>, which leads off with a great quote from this firedoglake post<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I do not care which person is your candidate. I don’t care what you think of Hillary Clinton as a potential president. What is being done in the press is akin to a pack of rabid 7th graders trying to haze the nerdy girl in school simply because they can. It has nothing to do with her qualifications — it has to do with gender, and these lemming pundits think that it’s perfectly acceptable because everyone is doing it, including women like Andrea Mitchell and Anne Kornblut.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Matthews stuff in particular is pretty damning, but they’re right that there’s a general antipathy toward both Clintons that really does seem to operate on a junior-high-clique sort of level. It takes some particularly vile turns when directed at Hillary. It’s reprehensible, and if this sort of nonsense were to end up costing her the Democratic nomination, that would suck.<\/p>\n

But here’s the thing: while this junior-high hazing would be a shitty reason to vote against Hillary, it’s also a shitty reason to vote for<\/strong> her.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

It’s really tempting, of course, to vote for her just to stick it to the “cool kids” of the media establishment. It would just about serve them right to have their efforts to smear her backfire and vault her into the presidency.<\/p>\n

But there are perfectly sensible reasons to not like her, that have nothing to do with sexism or media chicanery. You can find them extensively documents by people like Matthew Yglesias<\/a> and the Mark Kleiman and friends<\/a>. She’s got some dodgy views on executive power and whatever we’re calling our Middle East misadventures this week. She’s not my favorite of the Democratic candidates, that’s for sure, though she’s worlds better than any of the lunatics and imbeciles the GOP is throwing up.<\/p>\n

So it’s really kind of a no-win situation. If you vote against her because of the concerted effort to make her look bad on trivial grounds, you’re acceding to the influence of people with the ethics and morals of middle-school girls. But if you vote for<\/strong> her just to spite them, you’re still giving them undue influence over your decision-making processes.<\/p>\n

And, of course, no matter what people end up doing, the end result will be interpreted in a way that confirms the power of said middle-school girls.<\/p>\n

And they wonder why people get disgusted with the whole process.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a lot of people linking to this exhaustive recounting of Chris Matthews’s unhealthy fixation on Hillary Clinton, which leads off with a great quote from this firedoglake post: I do not care which person is your candidate. I don’t care what you think of Hillary Clinton as a potential president. What is being… Continue reading The Clinton Conundrum<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}