For those of you who don't know, Matt Taibbi is a caustic, rather funny, take no prisoners political writer/reporter for Rolling Stone (he also moonlights on Bill Maher's HBO show, Real Time.In the March 20, 2008 issue of RS, Taibbi takes on Hillary Clinton. The gist of his piece is that she is a ground-breaking politician, who through her own errors has martyred herself.
The part that struck me the most is excerpted below:
Every woman who was ever denied a promotion for spending too much time with her children or who had to deal with whispers of being a "bitch" or an "ice queen" when in fact she was just being a boss—they all couldn't help but see themselves in Hillary, a "substance" candidate dying on the cross of "likability."
But Hillary Clinton let them down, because presidential politics is not the corporate world, and her martyrdom was both inaccurate and imperfect. If there was any glass ceiling in this race for a promotion, it was the one erected by Hillary herself—you could even quantify it numerically, in the nearly 3-1 lead in superdelegates that Hillary, by virtue of her status as the pre-2008 anointed candidate of the Democratic Party apparatchiks, had wrapped up before the first votes were even cast.
He goes on to say that what really happened to Clinton is that she represents something old and she got taken down by the newer model. It is hard, as a woman, to not pin all your personal baggage on to Clinton in the way that Taibbi is referencing. She does represent, to a certain extent, the good girl that did everything right, worked hard and knew her stuff and still got rejected for the top gig. Many, many women identify with that in one shape or form. (Not that I do, no not at all. Not one little, bitty bit.)
There will always be something shinier and newer and more exciting out there, waiting to unseat the old guard. It happens in business, in life and in politics everyday. I guess it all comes down to whether or not you think change is good.
1 comment:
Matt Taibbi can be such a shill. I just read an alternet.org article ridiculing the massive local and international movement seeking answers and raising questions about the Bush Administration's version of the who/where/what/when/why of 9/11. It was a puff piece of low-end humor, why a journalist would find it funny to tear apart years of independent investigations, testimonies, evidence, photos, videos etc. contradicting the administrations' version of 9/11 makes me think that he's too well-paid to care like most of his counterparts. He smacks of "better-than-thou" elitism and it's too bad he's given such a mainstream voice... so that he can just carry the same bullshit from the white house to the masses.
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