Minutiae
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"Chuck Norris doesn't read books; he stares them down until he gets the information he wants out of them."
- ChuckNorrisFactsdotcom

Tuesday, June 10, 2003
Still fighting with Qwest. I was promised that the woman I spoke with last night would be following up on this today and call me back. 6:30pm no call. I called them and got some ancient woman who insisted that my voicemail worked and everything was fine, then put me on hold for 20 minutes, and hung up on me. At this point Benno (dear man) volunteered to take a shift of squawking and holding. He did a little better, he's got an actual tech on the phone. 70 minutes worth of phone time today and counting.

posted by Rachel 6/10/2003
. . .
I think
Andrew Sullivan hits the nail on the head.
"There's a solid 20 percent of the country who will do anything to prevent her from becoming president. Mention her name in some contexts and what you get is an irrational, near-hysterical tirade. Even now, rumors spread the instant she puts her head above the parapet. She didn't write her own book; she swears like a soldier at the Democratic Senatorial meetings; she holds grudges. Conservatives - especially in her own baby-boomer generation - froth at the mouth when discussing her. They despise her even more than Bill, who could be dismissed, in Bob Dole's words, as a "likable rogue." But whatever else Hillary is, she sure isn't likable. Frosty, arrogant, self-righteous, imperial, convinced of her own rectitude and of the evil that all Republicans represent, for many she incarnates her own generation's insufferable post-Watergate piety. If the deepest divide in American culture is still that between those who protested the Vietnam War and those who fought it, Hillary looms as the symbol of one side and one side only. She can never transcend this. From her early days as a junior prosecutor in Nixon's impeachment to her dismissal of women who "stay home and bake cookies" in the 1990s, she evokes opposition and, yes, hatred, like no-one else in American culture.

Some of this is clearly unfair. She is obviously a highly intelligent, focused, articulate politician. Her Faustian bargain with her philandering husband could be interpreted as a youthful mistake for which she has already paid dearly. At the same time, she clearly does believe not simply that her opponents are mistaken but that they are evil. Her instinctive response to her husband's betrayal and perjury - that it was entirely a fiction created by the right-wing - revealed how she truly sees the world. Her proximity to liberal bigots like Sidney Blumenthal suggests that her political goal is not to unify the country but to punish and humiliate half of it. Her paranoia in this respect should bar her from much higher political office, especially since her return to the White House would open wounds that have only recently begun to heal.

This cultural divide still exists, and may even be deepening. You saw it in the division between "blue" and "red" America - the liberal coasts and the conservative center - in the 2000 election. You see it in the impassioned debates about abortion - where the alienated pro-lifers have turned in a few extreme cases, to murder and terrorism. You see it even in the troubles of the New York Times, where a classic liberal baby-boomer, Howell Raines, so infuriated his colleagues and readers with pious liberal bromides that he was eventually forced to step down. You see it in the fights over gun control or gay rights. The division is not simply political - it's about something deeper, about the very identity of a country, which is still fiercely contested in America in ways not often seen elsewhere. Some are able to overcome this division. George W. Bush hasn't quite - he is still viscerally loathed in some pockets of "blue" America. But his conduct in the war on terror and his personal aversion to the politics of personal demonization have helped smoothe over some of the raw feelings of the Clinton era. But with Hillary, no such unifying could or would take place. She would be a replay of the rancor of the Nixon and Clinton eras. If she ran for office, she would divide an already divided country in ways that would tilt the United States toward poisonous political unrest.

That's why any sane person will hope she remains for ever a distinguished Senator for New York. And why those hopes will never deter her from pursuing her own ambitions at whatever cost to the country she aims one day to rule."

posted by Rachel 6/10/2003
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