The Fonz

The events of the last week have been dizzying, terrifying, historic, moving, inspiring....

Through it all, thoughts would whistle through my brain as possibilities for things to blog about ('As great as Obama is, he's a lot like the Beatles in that he is inspiring a lot of really God-awful stuff, and future politicians who will try to be like him -- Deval, Jindhal, Cory Booker etc. -- could end up being almost embarrassingly un-inspiring, answering him in pale imitation, no longer John and Paul but Liam and Noel Gallagher now...' or 'I can't pretend to know what it feels like to be on the other end of sexism, but...'), but nothing really jelled for me until I received the following email from one of you beloved readers, which read in part:

So I was looking on your blog for a sign of satisfaction at the results of the Democratic primary race...now that it is over, even by Hillary's own declaration.

Where is it? Nothing to say that in some form recognizes that your candidate has won this strategic primary race? Nothing to acknowledge the very excellent and superb concession and Obama endorsement speech that Hillary gave on Saturday? I know you didn't like the woman...and you folded your disdain into statements that she was the most hated person since Nixon...etc. etc., without ever really saying directly that you, Nick Davis, hated her guts. But honest-to-God, you gotta give it to her on that Saturday speech. (okay, she had someone write it for her, but she was the boss..the ultimate decider about what stance she would take and what attitude she wanted to convey...her "handlers" would not ever have been able to get her to say anything she didn't want to say...and had it not been sincere, we'dda picked it up immediately...she ain't that good an actress.

So give a little baby..a round of applause at least. She deserves it.

And my first response was in fact, yes, she did it. She did it beautifully and well, and with the proper amount of charm and graciousness and all that, and it almost made you forget most of the horrible things she'd done and said during the primary season. And I definitely feel, as I don't think I did in the heat of the Primary (now that we've decided to just singularize the damn thing), that she is going to be a solid envoy for the Obama campaign during the upcoming General Election, that she will campaign her heart out for the ticket (which I don't think will include her), and she'll do beautifully....

But.

BUT.

Then ask yourself: if she was going to be so good, if she had it in her all along to be so gracious, so smart, so well reasoned and thorough and yes even inspiring...

Then what the H-E Ell was she doing acting the way she was during the Primary? What was all that crap for? Was that just an act? Was that just 'let's do anything we can to win because this is all a game, and at the end of it we'll all shake hands and agree it didn't mean anything'? Because if that's what it was, I have news for you, Senator Clinton: this IS NOT a game. This is actually, you know, kind of important, more important than a game, more important than your ambition and ego and unapologetic shamelessness in pursuit of power.

Yes, I admit it: I hate this woman. I'm not proud of it, not proud of how she gets under my skin, but I also can't pretend that just because she said and did all the right things on Saturday, that somehow this makes it all okay. We know now who she is, and why does what she does - and it's no different than with her husband: they do it because they want power. Nothing wrong with that, either, of course. Doesn't make them different than about 99.9% of the other politicians out there (and I'm not even saying it makes them different than BHO himself), but it does mean that you can pretty much take what she says -- on any day -- with a kind of grain of salt. She does what she does to retain power. Period. The end.

The good news is, she and her husband have calculated that the best way for them to retain or regain power is to support Obama.

They are smart people, these Clintons. They rarely back the wrong horse. So that makes me happy, at last....