HuffPo has the latest from Anita Esterday, the waitress in Iowa who was not left a tip when Senator Clinton dropped by. (There was confusion about it at first; it is now clear that the Clinton campaign did not leave a tip but returned later and left $20.) This is a rational woman, and you gotta feel for her. Somebody started a rumor that she’d committed suicide, which she understands was probably a joke, but it was circulating in Cedar Rapids where she has friends, and her mother committed suicide, so it wasn’t very funny.
Plus, the place she works has suffered because the phone is busy all the time with reporters calling, and customers are sometimes unable to get through. So the whole controversy has cost her employers real money. In addition to her point that the media’s focusing on a trivial incident while there’s a war on, she points out that there are a lot of homeless people in the richest country in the world, and a lot of people like her, a single mother trying to raise two kids and barely making $20,000 a year. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
She reports that her mother was a Democrat and her father a Republican, and she remained mostly neutral. But no longer.
I’m not going to vote for Hillary. That is a definite. No one could pay me enough money. My opinion of her has changed drastically. The more I read and find out about her it changes more and more to the negative. I don’t believe she can help out the working women of this world because I don’t believe she gets it.
My take’s a bit different: I think she gets it, but she doesn’t care. Those aren’t her people; her people are on Wall Street.
I'd hoped Bill would get it as he did know some lesser times in his youth. And he sold out. Hillary's never known hardship. She recognized the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy but has never understood the Vacillating Professional Class indifference that at least 100 million Americans have known too well.
even marin county's Barbara Boxer displays far more empathy. Hillary gets a ton of flack that she doesn't deserve on inconsequential matters but on this, her major flaw, the mass media completely sidesteps it. Because they can't relate to reality either.
Posted by: Kevin Hayden on November 15, 2007 2:43 AMI agree, a lot of the grief Hillary gets is on trivial, even meaningless, stuff. But she gets away with not really intending to end the war, and not having a universal health-care plan, and so on, at the same time. It's weird.
A case can be made, it seems to me, that the traditional media don't relate to reality any more than Senator Clinton does because they're all essentially owned by the same sector of society, the ultra-rich. That's who the DLC represents, and of course the Republicans have always been that. It's unfortunately easy to co-opt people, especially social climbers.
One reason that many people don't vote is that they believe, in my opinion with good reason, that both parties represent the rich against them, so what do they care which one wins? It does matter, but it's a hard sell to convince them because it's true that both parties represent a small number of people against the vast majority of Americans.
If only we could get a real anti-war pro-health-care anti-poverty Democrat, we could win the election. Even the Republicans are tired of the war and the corruption. But so far they've fallen for the culture-war trick, in part because there's no Democratic counter based on economics. We need a new FDR-style coalition, which the DLC is there to prevent.
Posted by: Chuck Dupree on November 15, 2007 2:55 AM