Beat Down
32 years of marriage to Bill is no doubt an experience that included a lot of jazz, tap dancing, cow bells and snares. Here’s a jazz drummer’s wife’s take on Hill’s experience. UK Telegraph:
I’m married to a jazz drummer. I have sat at the front table in countless clubs, clapping and tapping my foot. I have even helped to schlep the snare and tom-tom into taxis. I have an amiable social relationship with any number of the cats with whom my husband plays. See, I even know some of the lingo. So I would like to advertise my services as a jazz drummer, too.
What, no bookings? Sticklers who object that I have never actually played the drums might reflect on Hillary Clinton’s claim that eight years “in” the White House (that is, physically under the roof) count as political “experience”, on the basis of which she deserves the presidency. Implicitly, Hillary has already been practically-president for two terms.
…
“So you decide which makes more sense,” she said on the campaign trail, “entrust our country to someone who is ready on Day One … or to put America in the hands of someone with little national or international experience, who started running for president the day he arrived in the US Senate.”
Now, that’s a coincidence. Didn’t Hillary in effect start running for president the day she arrived in the US Senate? To which she was only elected as a representative of New York State, where she had barely established residency, on the basis of all that “experience” watching her husband run the country. Indeed, her few years as a hands-on politician in the Senate have been overwhelmingly spent coalition-building and fund-raising for her presidential bid.
Damn, that wannabe percussionist taps out a mean beat.
Hillary herself asked this week: “How did running for president become a qualification to be president?” So we might reasonably ask as well: “How did being married to a president become a qualification to be president?”
I’m hard pressed to cite any other profession that confers a member’s expertise and occupational aptitude on the spouse. If I need legal advice, I don’t go to the husband of an eminent solicitor. If I need my appendix out, I’m not about to let the wife of a practised surgeon wield the knife.
Drummer’s wife snares the abiding value of political marriage.
Accordingly, the American public is being held hostage to a back-room deal surely struck in the latter 1990s: “I’ll stand by your side through this Monica debacle, so long as I get to be president, too.” Hence Hillary has capitalised on what the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent described this week as an “aura of inevitability” that surrounds her campaign. Democratic voters need not worry their pretty little heads about the matter; arranged with a hand-shake and maybe a make-up kiss: this nomination has been sewn up for years.
H/t the late, great Theo Spark who, sick of it all, ended it, but still reaching out from beyond.
Topics: pols
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 12:25 pm on Saturday, December 8, 2007
4 Responses to “Beat Down”
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December 8th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Yep.
December 8th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
Take care Theo.
Don’t retire your brain for too long.
December 8th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
I’m pretty sick of it all too, Theo.
To be fair, nobody who runs for president actually has the experience to be president (that implies doing the president’s job before you actually get it). On second that, maybe Hillary does have that experience.
Despite all the “inevitability” hooplah, I’ve always had the sense that Hillary won’t win the nomination. Of course I can be wrong, but she isn’t half as well-liked or trusted as Bill was, and even he made powerful enemies of former friends.
December 9th, 2007 at 5:35 am
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