Super Tuesday

This being Super Tuesday, some relevant comment seems appropriate. While personally I'm leaning Obama and McCain to get the nods, there are worse things than Clinton, and the hate going around drives me nuts. So I really enjoyed this article from Prof. Stanley Fish on the Hillary-hating phenomenon.

Comment 30, which critiques and adds on to the article itself, is particularly good. Excerpted:

Will I vote for Hillary? No.

Do I hate Hillary? No.

But I think this article misses the point. It’s not the rabid hatred of Hillary that’s so effective. It’s the way the rabid hatred of her affects everyone else in the following two ways:

1) If you wanted to vote for her, you would have to face the reality that she’s deeply reviled by so many (I’m not listening to the media, just my own largely Democratic family) and so you would be moved to look for another candidate.

2) Persons who have a mild dislike or ambivalence about her will be moved by the momentum of “Hillary hatred” to say the kinds of things I just heard at a dinner with my cousins last week: “Oh, God, anything but HILLARY” and “I can’t stand that woman,” and “the problem with Hillary is that she’s exactly the kind of person who thinks she’s smarter than you.”

When I responded that, like her or not, Hillary Clinton actually IS smarter than any of us who were at the dinner table, I was told that if she were really smart, she wouldn’t make everyone else in the room feel so stupid. They’ve got a point….