Clinton: Intentionally Trying To Piss Me Off?

I mean, WTF is going on??? I'm basically a Hillary Clinton kind of guy. She's in the ballpark in my book so far as most major policies go, I like policy wonks, I like centrists, I kinda trust DLC types because I figure that my intuitions about business and the economy are untrustworthy, I'd love to have a female president, I have an almost automatic (though rather modest) defend the Clintons response (that it took about six years of vicious, irrational, immoral conservative attacks for me to develop), and my gut feeling about her is that she's probably a decent person. Now, I do have several specific policy disagreements with her, and several specific criticisms. HOWEVER...she's the kind of person for whom I should be fairly happy to vote.

So how is it that the Clinton campaign has managed to alienate me?

I mean, there are several things pushing me more in Obama's direction, but I should be perfectly happy to have HRC as a back-up. And yet I'm finding myself less and less sympathetic toward her.

It's rather hard for me to tell what's going on. Much of it is the nastiness that's coming out of her campaign. Much of what attracts me to Obama is his understanding that tone matters--that, among other things, you can't expect to work well with someone who you were calling incompetent just a few months earlier. Also, HRC is starting to come across as rather a triangulator, and as someone who seems willing to risk blowing the general election in order to win.

Part of it, though, is probably the fact that Obama holds out the hope that we might have the first great president of my lifetime. I mean, maybe yes, maybe no, it's far too early to tell, and so forth... But the mere possibility is invigorating. After the last seven disastrous years, and after coming to believe that mediocrity might be the best we can hope for, it's hard not to be rather excited about the possibility of something more.

There's nothing wrong with criticism, of course--we have an obligation to criticize if we think it's called for. But when the criticism is low and nasty and unfair, then the criticizer seems low and nasty and unfair. Somewhere Richard Rorty--with whom I disagree about almost all things philosophical--says that we tend to recoil from a certain type of philosopher "because they seem cynical about our deepest hopes." And I suppose that's the way many of the the hard-core anti-Obama folks seem to me. Witness HRC's mocking "the clouds will open up" speech. It's not rational criticism to which I object, but, rather, this derision toward the very idea that, e.g., hope is something important, rather than something irrational or airy or stupid or foolish.