THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† It’s A Topsy-Turvy Campaign: Columnist Rich Lowry muses: “When Hillary Rodham gave the commencement address at Wellesley College in 1969, extolling the virtues of ‘human liberation’ on behalf of a restless generation of left-wing youth, did she have any idea one day she'd be the champion of old white beer-drinking Democrats everywhere?” He adds:
Hillary Clinton - part of the McGovernite takeover of the Democratic party - is representing the Democrats' culturally conservative wing (such as it is). …
It's only as compared to [Barack] Obama, of course, that Clinton looks like a curmudgeonly traditionalist. Only he could have given her such wide openings to defend small-town mores and (gingerly) chastise a black nationalist preacher. It's not policy differences on cultural issues that divide Obama and Clinton, but differing sensibilities. …
Hillary Clinton's Sister Souljah moment has been running against Obama, pushing herself to the center in relation to him and forging a bond with voters Democrats need in a general election. Oddly, she may be a more electable candidate now when the odds are against her winning the nomination than when she seemed a lock.
In one of those rare instances when pundits on the right and left agree, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. writes: “Hillary Clinton found a compelling voice and a plausible strategy only after she had squandered her chances of winning the nomination without a divisive struggle over superdelegates and convention rules. It took a series of defeats to galvanize her campaign and help her put forward a better self.”
† Putting The “Boo” In Boomer (second item): Writing in New York magazine, Kurt Andersen admits that, “[a]s a poster couple” for baby boomers, Billary has “become a bit of an embarrassment”:
When Bill Clinton was first elected, baby-boomers had just become an absolute majority of working journalists, and among some of them simmered an envy-cum-distrust of the first baby-boomer commander-in-chief. Somebody our age is president? Then, over the course of Bill Clinton’s (bungled, distasteful) presidency and Hillary Clinton’s (bungled, distasteful) campaign for the presidency, the couple have separately and together become incarnations of the most unattractive attributes of their generation’s elite - blind ambition cloaked in do-good self-righteousness, a sense of entitlement, high-handed snobbiness (“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies”), hedonism (Monica et al.), narcissism.
Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are Baby Boomers – albeit at opposite ends of the demographic bulge – so a vote for John McCain is, among other things, a vote against electing a third boomer president in a row. Even if that’s your only reason to vote for McCain, it’s still a pretty good one.
† The Other Shoe Drops (“To Tell The Truth,” third item): Recent studies examining the psychology of lying suggest that exaggerating personal accomplishments, such as grade-point average, isn’t the same as lying or keeping secret, reports The New York Times. Detailing the findings of a recent study published in the journal Emotion, The Times explains “as much as these are embroideries, they are also expressions of yearning, and for reachable goals”:
The researchers had 62 Northeastern University students fill out a computerized form asking, among other things, for cumulative grade point average. The students were then interviewed while hooked up to an array of sensitive electrodes measuring nervous system activation. The scripted interview covered academic history, goals and grades.
The researchers then pulled the students’ records, with permission, and found that almost half had exaggerated their average by as much as six-tenths of a point. Yet the electrode readings showed that oddly enough, the exaggerators became significantly more relaxed while discussing their grades. …
The grade inflation was less an attempt to deceive, the authors concluded, than a reflection of healthy overconfidence and a statement of aspirations. “It’s basically an exercise in projecting the self toward one’s goals,” Dr. Gramzow said.
In earlier studies, Dr. Gramzow and Dr. Willard found that students who bumped up their averages in interviews subsequently improved their grades - often by the very amount they had exaggerated.
The Times offers this research as “another lens through which to view claims, from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s story of sniper fire in Bosnia to exaggerations of income, charitable contributions and SAT scores.” And the self-aggrandizement of a certain talentless nonentity who finds it necessary to inflate her meager credentials.
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