Hillary Clinton's Crocodile Tears?

Hillary Clinton’s voice usually has all the warmth and humanness of a computer-generated telemarketer. Her halting cadence, monotonous tone, and bland delivery remind me of the pod people in the sci-fi classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As much as I detest George W. Bush, and everything his administration stands for, I’m not sure I’m ready to vote for someone who acts like a Queen Bee. I can deal with Alpha Males, but Hillary’s stinging stares and venomous glares against her campaign rivals make them appear like male drones about to be devoured.

Hillary’s tears certainly stung Obama’s chances in New Hampshire. But was Hillary’s misty-eyed emotional display spontaneous or a carefully choreographed political calculation? Her words certainly seemed finely calibrated to appeal to a demographic that would prove crucial to her victory, namely young, single working mothers. For instance, Hillary expressed her presidential aspiration in terms any waitress, hygienist, or sales clerk could identify. "It’s not easy," Hillary began, "but some of us put ourselves out there everyday . . . against great odds . . . because we care about our country, each one of us."

Substitute the word "family" for "country" and many single moms could imagine themselves saying exactly the same thing. Hillary’s masterstroke was to frame her campaign in the political arena as the same kind of struggle working women face everyday. She then added a clever coda: "Some of us are right, and some of her wrong. Some of are ready, and some of us not." Ironically, her presumptuous catchphrase, "Some of us are right, some of us are wrong," is nothing but a kinder, gentler version of Bush’s Manichean slogan (i.e., "you are either with us or against us").

Was Nixon’s "Checkers Speech" authentic or contrived? In a figure as complex as Nixon it may have been both. Perhaps it doesn’t matter if Hillary’s campaign-saving emotional display was spontaneous or not, it was effective political theatre in a realm where everyone is an actor to some extent. A lot of voters clearly found Hillary’s emotional display refreshing, and the candidate clearly believes she has found her voice. But it says something about the electorate that what Hillary said was far less decisive than how she said it. After all, when it came to the Iraq War some of us (including Obama) were right, and Hillary was wrong.

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