Click for Main Weblog

   
The Weblog at The View from the Core - Tue. 01/08/08 01:06:06 PM
   
   

The Cry of the Clinton

Genuine? Or not? Or... both?

Once again daring enough to follow the pack, your Humble, Faithful Blogster is willing to be the last blogger in America to comment on Hillary Clinton's tears yesterday.

Given that such a "real" moment was not only expected but actually predicted, one cannot help but wonder whether her moment of moisture was genuine. Unlikely, it would seem. But no less than Dick Morris believes it was a genuine moment:

Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser and current arch-enemy of Hillary Clinton, told Sean Hannity tonight that he thinks Hillary's emotional display of today was genuine. Morris says that he saw basically the same thing from Hillary in private after the crushing defeat the Democrats suffered in 1994....

My first take was that she couldn't have faked it; her husband could fake that, youbetchaboy! But not Hillary, even if she wanted to do so. Yet, without getting into Hillary Clinton's mind (Heaven forfend!), how could we really ever tell whether her "emotional display" was genuine?

How about by getting into our own minds?

In two known instances — one private, one public — Clinton has come to tears. In each case, she's been under great stress — the stress of a political failure she didn't forsee except, perhaps, in her nightmares. (I suppose one would have to be a politician to imagine what a horror that could be; and, maybe, one would have to be a Clinton to imagine the earth-shaking, universe-rattling dimensions of the horror. Imagine, indeed.)

Though it a truism, it is nonetheless true, to say that such times bring out the worst in a person. We have all been disappointed... angered... frustrated... exhausted... to the point where we have said or done something that a few days or a few hours — if not a few moments — later cause us to think How in the world could I have done that? or I can't believe I could ever say anything like that!

In a way, those moments are genuine: they're not scripted; they're not planned; they're not even contemplated. Often, sooner or later, they are regretted. In a way, though, they are not genuine: they're not deliberate, they're not chosen, they're not even contemplated. They do not reveal us as we are — not entirely. They reveal the under-developed parts of our personality that momentarily gain the upper-hand in our behavior. And we come to regret them, not necessarily because what we did or said was wrong, but because we were not being ourselves.

So, I think the Cry of the Clinton was a genuine expression, but not the genuine Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Tue. 01/08/08 01:06:06 PM
Categorized as Political.

   

The Blog from the Core © 2002-2008 E. L. Core. All rights reserved.