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Blog Thyself: Tears in New Hampshire
By Bruce | January 9, 2008
Politics is a hard ‘hoe to handle.
In all early indications last night, Hillary Clinton was leading in New Hampshire, confounding political posturing published by a shitload of political pundits (including this writer) reading way-more into Barack Obama’s rapid-gathering snowball just five days ago in Iowa. And then fairly early in the evening (about 7:40 p.m. PST), MSNBC called the first primary for Hillary.
How the great have fallen: Smart-ass political shamans discover the real world.
One could not even imagine the technology just a few years ago to allow a guy to sit in pajamas, sip coffee and open a virtual library full of everything. We’re actually now living in a well-made, smart-acted 1970s science-fiction movie. Of course, that movie could capture the hardware, but not the software of 2008 A.D.
The gritty, real-time, future-now reality of actually living nowadays could never have been predicted. All the Arthur C. Clarkes and Ray Bradburys in the world (maybe, supposedly, Kurt Vonnegut would get close) could adequately explain the all-prevailing gloom currently saturating the earth, especially in America: An-almost invisible, mist-like web of despondency, its sticky goo akin maybe to light syrup, blankets the tiny details.
Yesterday, Hillary started winning early and the entire news system floundered a bit after being so, so positive Obama would highly-prevail. I’d written last week that Obama’s Iowa win would start a “Bobby Kennedy-like juggernaut…” — should have read ‘jugger-Not.’
The New Hampshire vote was close, however, with Hillary at about 39 percent and Obama three points lower at 36 percent. Apparently, this presidential race can not be figured out right now, the old adage, ‘It ain’t over til the fat lady sings’ comes to mind about trying to gauge how this forum will finish in November. And I’ve always wondered which ‘fat lady’? Or what if a bunch of fat ladies sing?
And of that: One crucial event of the New Hampshire primary was Hillary crying not singing. The performance came at a coffee shop in Portsmouth, NH. In a small crowd, made up mostly of women Hillary’s age, she responded to a question about how she manages to cope with life.
A reporter for the Wall Street Journal was in attendance:
“It’s not easy, it’s not easy,” Clinton said shaking her head. Her eyes began to get watery as she finished answering the question, “I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do. This is very personal for me. I have so many ideas for this country and I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. It’s about our country, it’s about our kids’ future,” she said softly crying, her voice breaking. The group of 15 women sitting around a table at the Cafe Espresso nodded understandingly. Clinton continued, her voice still cracking: “We do it each one of us because we care about our country, but some of us are right and some of us are wrong, some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we’ll do on day one and some of us don’t,” she said.
A lot was said about Hillary’s performance, from calling it fake — Bill Kristol, who should be taking showers in a federal pen instead of now being on the payroll of the New York Times — piped up that Hillary “pretended to cry. The women felt sorry for her and she won” — to accolades for Bill’s old lady in showing some humanity. Whatever the course, Hillary’s New Hampshire win, no matter how small, no matter the substance to the tears, has at least shown 2008′s presidential race will be interesting.
And on the other side of the aisle is another marvel: John McCain. Here’s a guy that just won’t quit, despite needing to years ago. He nailed down 37 percent of the insane: Republicans. Even with all the current available information from many reputable sources about what has taken place in/and with America the last seven years, it’s a total wonder how anyone could vote Republican, at least this year, at least until the current administration is removed. Or even say they voted Republican.
McCain beat Mitt Romney by a couple of percentage points — 37 to 35.
The Republicans, however, are like their president, so far removed from reality it’s easy to write ‘em off. But at the same damn time, you gotta watch ‘em: They have a tendency to come back from the dead — Dick Nixon to now John McCain.
Receiving information is now just literal fingertips away. Although humans want the visual, getting information just from television is nowhere effective as online. The marvel that lets me surf through a huge selection of current news events and all their related/unrelated/direct/indirect offshoots also creates a very, very small space to ponder what happens next. Beyond the now-accepted as part-of-life Internet, a kind of sub-Internet has developed: blogs.
The Web as we know it is just 19 years old and has way-quickly evolved. Blogs in the beginning were geek-to-geek communications. As a vehicle for more stuff beyond the technical, blogs expanded into daily blogs in the early 1990s, and although slow to catch at the start, by 2001 it had become a media phenomenon. Since 2004, mainsteam media outlets now all carry blogs, most of the time, multi-blogs.
Even the White House.
On Tuesday, George W. Bush’s press secretary, Dana Perino, announced that during the president’s trip to the Middle East, which started yesterday, periodic updates will be posted on the White House Website. The posting will be called “Trip Notes from the Middle East,” Perino said, and will include contributions from John Bolton, Stephen Hadley and herself, among others.
But according to a reflection in her answer from a reporter about whether the postings would constitute a “blog,” she seemed ackward using the word blog out-loud: “A little bit like a blog, yes — dare I say.”
If one seeks information from the Internet, from blogs, from news/entertainment/knowledge Websites, most of the data mined would be aimed in a very-negative way directly at Perino’s boss — so she would be understandingly discomforted by the nasty-tasting irony.
And so Hillary’s tears could also be tears for this entire sad state of affairs. Whatever Hillary’s intention and emotions, when asked how she got up in the morning, it was an answer most human beings — some more worse, way more, than others — share in 2008 A.D: “It’s not easy…”
Hillary’s win finished a five-day-old dream: Obama was a sure sign that things were on a major turnaround — the Iraq war, the environment, the slipping economy, bad weather all over, Dafur, $3.50-a-gallon gas at the pump, unemployment at 5 percent, you name it — and a dismal future had some hope in it.
As Obama said this morning, now the “rough and tumble” of ordinary politics.
We lost with Hillary’s win — that’s worth a cry no matter your gender.
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