Hillary Clinton after reading Richard Cohen, probably.
It's hard for a column by the
Washington Post's Richard Cohen to enter his list of all-time greatest duds. After all, this is the man who wrote
this. And a
whole lot of other racist stuff. Not without reason was he the
eighth runner up for wanker of the decade. Still, today brings us
another candidate for the Richard Cohen hall of shame.
You see, with Joe Biden heading for Iowa for a little 2016 pre-campaigning, Cohen feels that Hillary Clinton "needs a message." Never mind that he never identifies what Biden's message is, beyond eating steak in Iowa and being the vice president, somehow Biden is Cohen's foil for a message-less Clinton. Or, she's not quite entirely without message, but ...
At the moment, her only one is that she is a woman. Becoming the first female president is a worthy goal, but it kind of falls into the category of miles traveled and countries visited. It is an achievement, even a stunning one, but it is not a stirring trumpet call.
Right. The "she's just a woman, she needs more than just being a woman" argument used to brush off a woman's achievements while somehow ignoring that for generations just being a man has been plenty. As for Cohen's invocation of "miles traveled and countries visited," he seems to believe that Clinton having traveled a lot of miles and visited a lot of countries as secretary of state is a demonstration that she had no accomplishments. Is Cohen not aware that anything happened anywhere else in the world between 2009 and early 2013?
Having dispensed with Clinton's potential for making history (something some people do find to be a stirring trumpet call, actually) and reduced her role as secretary of state to that of tourist, Cohen just starts throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. There's the transitive property of Anthony Weiner's wang:
Anthony Weiner, whose association with Clinton through his wife, Huma Abedin—a Hillary Clinton intimate—has the Clintons running so fast the other way she may well revisit Togo by the time this is over.
There's Clinton's age:
But if she is to run for president at the age of 68, she must rediscover her youth.
(And sure, Joe Biden will be 73, but again, he's the
vice president and he has a
penis. He doesn't need to have a message to convince Cohen he has a message.)
Richard Cohen being a longtime political columnist, he shouldn't need to be told this, but as he apparently does, here's a little primer on where Hillary Clinton stands right now: She's not a candidate yet. In fact, Clinton's popularity has benefited greatly from her years in a non-political role, and as soon as she makes moves toward a 2016 campaign, attacks on her will ratchet back up and as a partisan figure she'll lose some of her popularity, as a matter of course. (You know, attacks like that she's just a woman and Anthony Weiner's wife works for her and she's old ...) It's to her benefit to not have a single strong campaign message right now, because she's not f'ing campaigning! The message that works in 2013 might not be the message you'd want to run on in 2015 and 2016. All of which Cohen must on some level know. But he's more interested in spewing the most banal possible distillation of the anti-Hillary, can't we just get a president who looks like I think presidents should look message.