Friday, March 23, 2007

MORE STRAY THOUGHTS ABOUT THE HILLARY AD

One reason I found the ad disheartening was that the leading Republican candidate for president once said the following:

Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do.

I don't know if there's audio or video of that floating around, but if you're going to do an ad the evokes totalitarianism and fascism and 1984, don't these words of Rudy Giuliani seem a hell of a lot more apropos?

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And I may be reading too much into this, but here goes: Phil de Vellis called the ad "Vote Different." Last weekend, the San Francisco Chronicle called it "Hillary 1984," as did Drudge. Yet the title that seems to be catching on is "Big Sister."

Obviously it's a cleverer play on words. But beyond that, and beyond the emphasis on the totalitarian, I wonder if it's also, for some people, evoking the image of a bossy female sibling.

I think an awful lot of Hillary-hate fits her into images from childhood. See also Maureen Dowd a couple of months ago:

When she was little, Hillary Rodham would sit on a basement bench and pretend she was flying a spaceship to Mars. Her younger brother Hugh, perched behind, would sometimes beg for a chance to be captain.

No dice. ''She would always drive, and I would always have to sit in the back,'' he once told me....


So we should never vote for a presidential candidate who sometimes bossed a younger sibling around as a little kid? (Er, isn't that all older siblings?) Or do we apply this rule only to women? Or to Democrats? Or to Democratic women? Or just to Hillary?

Look -- oppose her on issues, or on how much you think she might compromise with the right. But don't oppose her for reasons like this.

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