Watching Hillary’s camapaign suspension speech. I will always find her worldview and policies repellant, and she and Bill have run one of the tackiest public households in American politics. But she’s grown a lot as a speaker. She sounds sincere. Her smile seems real. She seems confident and forthright and relaxed and very American in the best way.* (I’m kind of a sucker for that Gaboon viper combination of brown and teal for some reason, too.) I don’t like feeling contempt for people, and I feel much less contempt for her now than I did even just a few months ago.

* Again, I’m talking about her demeanor. That part about how we have individual liberties, but what’s REALLY COOL is when we gather into collectives, made my flesh crawl.

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Faye Wattleton looks great! (She’s on the post mortem thing on CNN.) However, it’s a sign of the times that the first thing I thought when I saw her was, She has a terrific surgeon! She can’t have gotten that referral through Planned Parenthood…. But who knows? Maybe she’s had no work done and those long bangs are just a style.

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Mmmm…Bavarian Creme.

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I wish people would read more carefully. It would eliminate so very much unnecessary unpleasantness from life. A few days ago, Megan McArdle wrote:

Even if you don’t like Barack Obama, I think you should be happy that the country has, with really very little fuss, nominated a black man with a very good shot at the presidency. (I didn’t support Clinton, but I would have been glad to know that we could nominate a woman–not that I’m saying this is the reason we didn’t nominate her.)

Bill Quick at Daily Pundit replied waspishly:

Megan is simply being racist here – it doesn’t matter what Obama espouses, we should be happy because we nominated a black man. Should we be happy if the black man was Al Sharpton? Reverend Wright? Just because they are black?

I understand what Megan is trying to get at – that nominating any black man without rioting in the streets or the media is a sign of some kind of national maturity, or the true state of racism in the US – not very strong – but happiness is not a word I’d use to describe my feelings about an Obama nomination.

“We should be happy because we nominated a black man” is at least within spitting distance of what McArdle wrote, and IIRC, she is, in fact, an Obama supporter. But she wasn’t talking about being happy with Obama as an individual candidate. She was talking about being happy that, in the blink of a historical eye after the Civil Rights Act, we actually have a black presumptive presidential nominee in one of the two major parties.

What’s the problem with that? I say this as a libertarian who supported and still supports the Iraq occupation and who lived in East Asia for twelve years. The prospect of an Obama presidency scares the bejeezus out of me. And even if his greenness didn’t scare me, I’d be opposed to his political principles, such that one can divine them. I think lots of his supporters have been cutting him slack that they would not cut for another candidate because they’re eager to participate in the healing gesture of nominating a black candidate. Yes, I do.

However, he’s the pioneer, and the progress made by pioneers tends to be rough. Presidential politics is not a forum in which we’re yet become accustomed to seeing black people (or, to a lesser extent, women). Because we’ve just watched Obama and Clinton duke it out for the Democratic nomination, it’s going to be easier for the first small-government, classical-liberal minority or woman candidate to be considered on policy merits rather than demographic “history-making.” I don’t think that pointing that out makes anyone racist.

So, good on Obama. Now let’s make sure–please–that he doesn’t become president.

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I want to hug my air conditioner. I want to give it a foot massage and a scalp massage and feed it peeled grapes from a silver salver and clasp its head to my chest and whisper that it’s the only thing in this world that I can rely on to have my true happiness at heart.

And it’s only the beginning of June.

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I didn’t post on the D-Day anniversary, but Eric did.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 14:10 and is filed under misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.