Years of Poems and Spirits

NYT used the title “The Show of Emotion Heard ’Round the Presidential Campaign World” to describe Hillary’s near-breakdown a couple of days ago. Now that Hillary just won N.H., even her campaign manager acknowledges that a little “humanization” helped a lot.

Thoughts:
1. The reason many people don’t like Hillary is because she made herself non-connectable. People are not able to look at her and say, I know how she feels. For anyone who has suffered as much public humiliation and attacks as she has should feel angry and insecure. But not Hillary. All we are looking for is a little “princess-ness” in her, but she just singlemindedly worked herself up as the widowed-career-woman-turned-mother-in-law of America.

2. For the above-stated reason, I hope Hillary fails. Because she may win but she may never have a mandate. If people cannot connect to her, they won’t lend her goodwill or benefit of doubts. That just leaves door to endless partisan gridlock: what if the Republicans in the Congress don’t hand her any victory in her first 100 days–without knowing any details, who would most people likely to blame? But what if it is someone who is more personally appealing?

3. Doesn’t this argument work in a boarder context, say state and society? Can we say that if people get what they expected, they are more likely to obey the rules? That goes back to one of the first questions Migdal asked in our class, “why people are waiting at traffic light in the middle of the night?” Doesn’t expectation come from “connection”? I know it is a little fuzzy here … need to work on the logic more … heyhey

4. What does Obama’s “Change” mean? I suspect it is a masquerade for the resentment toward the war and the Bush administration. Is it likely that many of those who voted for Obama (the young and the first-timers) also agitated against the war? And they realized that the anger cannot cash out in Congress so they took it out on Hillary (aka the establishment)? I certainly hope so.