Night of the Living Dead
Gets bad reviews. But before we get to the whiny critics, who apparently showed up at the wrong theater, thought they were at some art house and obviously have no appreciation for schlock horror B flicks, here’s NYT’s Dowd with the plot line:
He thought a little thing like winning would stop her?
Oh, Bambi.
Whoever said that after denial comes acceptance hadn’t met the Clintons.
If Hillary could not have an acceptance speech, she wasn’t going to have acceptance.
“It’s never going to end,” sighed one Democrat who has been advising Hillary. “We’re just moving to a new phase.”
Barry has been trying to shake off Hillary and pivot for quite a long time now, but she has managed to keep her teeth in his ankle and raise serious doubts about his potency. Getting dragged across the finish line Tuesday night by Democrats who had had enough of the rapacious Clintons, who had decided, if it came to it, that they would rather lose with Obama than win with Hillary, the Illinois senator tried to celebrate at the St. Paul arena where Republicans will anoint John McCain in September.
But even as Obama was trying to savor, Hillary was refusing to sever. Ignoring the attempts of Obama and his surrogates to graciously say how “extraordinary” she was as they showed her the exit, she and a self-pitying Bill continued to pull focus. Outside Baruch College, where she was to speak, her fierce feminist supporters screamed “Denver! Denver! Denver!”
Dowd appreciates a good upstaging performance when she sees one.
Even as Obama got ready to come out on stage for his victory party, the Clinton campaign announced that it had won a Wyoming superdelegate and Terry McAuliffe introduced her at Baruch as “the next president of the United States.” She gave a brief nod to Obama without conceding that he was the nominee before rushing through a variation on her stump speech. She clung to her fuzzy math about winning the popular vote, and in one last fudge she said: “Thanks so much to South Dakota. You had the last word” — even though the Montana polls still had 25 minutes to go.
“What does Hillary want?” she mused, in her most self-aware moment in some time. “I will be making no decisions tonight,” she concluded, asking fans to go to her Web site to share their thoughts.
And, even though Democrats were no longer listening, Hillary’s camp radiated the message that Obama was a sucker who had played by the rules on Florida and Michigan, and then reached an appeasing compromise, and that such a weak sister could never handle Putin or I’m-A-Dinner-Jacket.
As he was reaching the magic number of delegates, she was devilishly stealing the spotlight. First, her camp vociferously denied an Associated Press report that she would concede and then, in a conference call with the New York delegation, she gave a green light to supporters to push for her to be on the ticket.
Sequel? What do you think?
Clintonologists know that Hillary is up to something, but they aren’t sure what. Theory No. 1 is that it’s the Cassandra “I told you so” gambit: She believes intensely that he’s too black, too weak and too elitist — with all his salmon and organic tea and steamed broccoli — to beat her pal John McCain. But she has to pretend she’ll do “whatever it takes,” even accept the vice presidency, a job she’s already had and doesn’t want again, so that nobody will blame her when he loses on Nov. 4. Then she can power on to 2012.
Theory No. 2 is that it’s a “Bad stuff happens” maneuver, exemplified in her gaffe about the R.F.K. assassination, that she figures that at least if she moves a few blocks from Embassy Row to the Naval Observatory, she’ll be a heartbeat away from the job she’s always wanted.
Either way, by broadcasting that she’s open to being Obama’s running mate, she puts public pressure on him similar to the sort of pressure Walter Mondale was under from rampaging feminists when he put Geraldine Ferraro on the ticket. Mondale ended up seeming henpecked, as Obama would seem if he caved to the women who say they will write in Hillary’s name or vote for anti-choice McCain before they’d vote for Obama.
OK, on to the miffed critics, reax ranging from disdainful sniffing to emotive, artful rage.
I probably shouldn’t write any more about this woman and her staff. Suffice it to say that I’ve found her behavior over the past couple of months to be utterly unconscionable and this speech is no different. I think if I were to try to express how I really feel about the people who’ve been enabling her behavior, I’d say something deeply unwise. Suffice it to say, that for quite a while now all of John McCain’s most effective allies have been on Hillary Clinton’s payroll.
UK Guardian’s Michael Tomasky:
The lead story tonight - my “lede,” as we spell it here - should have been about the remarkable fact that a black man has been nominated by a major party to lead a developed Western nation for the first time in the history of the world. A man - in whose lifetime people with his shade of skin were denied the right to vote and to use public accommodations - who is now on the cusp of the presidency. It says something good about America, and I would like to have been able to dwell on it.
But no. Once again, it’s all about Hillary Clinton, who delivered the most abrasive, self-absorbed, selfish, delusional, emasculating and extortionate political speech I’ve heard in a long time. And I’ve left out some adjectives, just to be polite.
Apparently he’s forgotten what fellow Brit John Lennon said about woman. Use of the gender-charged term “emasculating” is noted. Thanks for saying something nice about America, though. Might want to add that we’re light years ahead of Europe in actual race relations and in our openness about the issue. Note: we also use the word “lede” on this side of the pond. Tally ho! Pip pip.
The New Republic’s Stump may not fully appreciate the genre, but seems to recognize a bad B-flick for what it is:
What good could possibly come of this? With Hillary proclaiming herself the legitimate winner, they’re clearly going to say “keep going.” If she actually does keep going, that’s a disaster for the Democratic Party. And if she doesn’t, you’ve just drawn a ton of attention to the fact that a large chunk of the party doesn’t accept Obama as the legimiate nominee. No, worse: you’ve encouraged them to think that, then drawn attention to it.
What a disaster.
Andrew Sullivan gets it:
Classless, graceless, shameless, relentless. Pure Clinton.
… She will not go away. The Clintons will never go away. And they will do all they can to cripple any Democrat who tries to replace them. In the tent or out of it, it is always about them. And they are no longer rivals to Obama; they are threats.
Fred Barnes at Weekly Standard: Please, please, go back to look for your friend, open that door, go into the shower. Can’t have the obligatory gone-back-to-look-for-your-friend, door-opening, shower-scene horrors if you don’t. Sorry, I’m getting carried away. Actually, he’s advising Obama to take Hill on as veep.
Surber thinks the Obama and the party apparatchiks can smother Hill with pillows. I thought he knew how this plot line goes. Until she concedes, I’m not willing to concede that the eye-gouging fun is over. Even then …
Belmont Club, which beat me to the punch with the “Night of the Living Dead” title, sees it playing out as more of a historical epic. Kind of “Gone with the Wind-y.” Or “Windy,” as you like.
Hillary has done some dumb things and nothing prevents her from doing more dumb things. But if she has this move properly gamed out and is raising the stakes, then why settle for second place? Rebellion is an all-or-nothing business as Jefferson Davis well knew.
Hey, is that am inadvertant racial overtone in there? I guess not. Obama’s ancestors were with Davis in that one, if I’m not wrong.
Gateway notes that Hollywood lost its taste for this script early. He zeroes in on the supporting cast, Bubba looking blue.
Here’s a sequel. Ambinder reports Clinton camp followers calling McCain’s people.
Jackie Calmes at WSJ critiques the Clinton campaign as if it were a dead, lifeless thing, apparently unfamiliar with the genre.
Bravo! Washington Post’s Milbank awards the Best Actor Oscar to the supporting actress:
It was an extraordinary performance by a woman who had been counted out of the race even when she still had a legitimate chance. Now she had been mathematically eliminated — and she spoke as if she had won.
Though some might think her remarks self-delusional, Clinton wasn’t kidding herself; earlier in the day, Clinton had told lawmakers privately that the race was over and she would consider being Obama’s vice president. Her public defiance reflected a shift in the balance of power that came with Obama’s victory. Now that he had won the race, he would need to woo Clinton if he wanted to prevail in November.
For anyone afraid of bad dreams after all that, we’ll close with a big hug. Sheri and Alan Rivlin at RCP, “It’s Now All About Respect.”
Hang on, short feature follows. Malkin says thanks for the memories. Vote for your favorite.
Uh oh, trouble in the cheap seats. This indignant Huffposter wants her money back: “I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat.”
LA Times Top of the Ticket: Cleaning crew coming through. Dean. Pelosi, Reid push superdelegates to commit by Friday. Please take all trash with you as you exit the theater. Receptacles near the doors. Special thanks to Michigan voters for donating half their tickets to a worthy cause.
With thanks to Memeorandum and RealClearPolitics on the roundup.
Topics: Clintons
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:45 am on Wednesday, June 4, 2008
4 Responses to “Night of the Living Dead”
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June 4th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
[...] UPDATE: Jules Crittenden called it the Night of the Living Dead. [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Just when you think it couldn’t get any more entertaining…
June 4th, 2008 at 3:34 pm
“Shoot ‘em in the head. That seems to put ‘em down.”
– Sheriff on TV gives advice, “Night of the Living Dead”
June 4th, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Hillay for Obama’s Veep? One word: McBird. Why tempt making a fictional and slanderous fantasy come true?
I always expected Obama to win. The Dems will want their antique, reactionary left wing whine in a bright, shiny new bottle. Somebody should tell Obama that socialism failed in the 20th Century. He doesn’t seem to have been paying attention and failed to note the fact, any more than he’s been paying attention to Iraq since the surge began.