Years ago, shortly after becoming the junior Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton had a lunch with Rupert Murdoch that rocked many of us at the time. I'm going to admit right now, back then, that I thought it was smart politics. It was a bold move, it seemed to me. This was when I lived in New York City and liked her. I watched as the review of the biography of her was trashed inside the pages of the New York Post, and I thought, she's finally outmaneuvered the vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Now I know, she just entered it.
Her patterns in this campaign are familiar, but not for her. The Hillary I remember, I remember very well: the first time I saw her speak, at my brother's graduation from U Penn, in 1992, I found her to be an electrifying public speaker. She held the auditorium with her eloquent intelligence, and her passionate caring. I don't think she looked down at her script once. I felt proud to be an American that afternoon, as we walked my brother away from the ceremony.
16 years later, I find her doing everything she fought her whole life: guilt by association politics, smarmy symbolic pandering, negative campaigning, using 527s to attack her opponents, not taking questions at public appearances, or having carefully scripted events. Her sucking up to McCain, her appearance on Fox News, these things terrified and saddened me, and it seemed to me that little lunch, that I thought was so smart, was when she really started to walk the path away from the woman I thought was so impressive that day.
My vote has been cast for a while. I voted for Obama in the Massachusetts primary. I've been watching the race now with real concern, skeptical of my impatience for it to be over: I feel like the Bush years have left us unable to tolerate difference and dissidence. I believe it will make for a stronger candidate, I do. But the discovery that Blumenthal has been using Right-Wing smears on Obama, the use of Mark Penn, the promos that McAuliffe made for Fox, these all render Hillary, to me, the G.W. Bush Republican inside the party, worse to me than Lieberman. And so I must say, if Hillary wins the Democratic nomination somehow, I will not vote for her. Because this year I'm just not voting for a Republican.
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