The Dish

She wept because, for a brief moment, she was asked about herself:

"I spend my time out on the campaign trail — it’s usually about what I can do for somebody else. I’m very ‘other’ directed — I don’t like talking about myself. … For me, it’s always about, ‘What can I do for you? How can I help you?’ And I was very touched when that woman said, ‘How are you doing? How do you get up in the morning?’"

It must be so hard to be so selfless for so long, to sacrifice your life for the benefit of humankind, to go through so many travails purely for the sake of others, only to have some misguided people actually challenge you for the nomination. Perhaps they don’t understand that they are running against the forces of good and progress. So good to hear the truth, then, from the lowly voters. And how moving it must suddenly have been to get support from a woman who, for some reason, then voted for Obama. The people know the real selfless Clinton behind the media’s hatred, the selfless balm for the poor and hope for the oppressed, the woman who endured all the trials of being First Lady and a multi-million book contract just for the sake of others. And they reached out and touched their merciful benefactress.

How could she do anything but weep?

Perhaps most tellingly: her eighteen year-old daughter pushed her over the top. The next generation doesn’t want to return to Mark Penn’s voter micro-bribes.

It’s striking how identity politics has suddenly come roaring back in this campaign: gender, race and, of course, religion:

"I don’t presume that you automatically support me because of a common faith. I know I have to earn that. But I also recognize that there is a unique kind of opportunity. For a long time, those of us who are people of faith are asked to support candidates who would come and talk to us. But rarely has there been one who comes from us."

Some cultural identification is inevitable in America, and not the worst thing in the world. What’s worrying is when candidates do not just accept this, but seek to exploit it directly. Huckabee’s appeal to Christianists is the most troubling; but Clinton’s on gender grounds is not that much better. So far, Obama’s campaign has resisted crude racial appeals, but this has seemed to unravel a bit in the wake of the Clintons’ rhetorical slips this past week. Less is more, on this front. Or we begin to lose the capacity to see ourselves as equal participants in a democracy, rather than interest groups fighting for what’s and who’s ours.

My Sunday Times column on Clinton, Obama and the race and gender wars can be read here.

Lindsey Graham with one of the dumbest statements yet in the campaign:

"People of faith want a candidate who can beat radical Islam."

I can see what he’s trying to say, but jeez. Polarizing much?

I got the former president’s fundraising email for his wife (and, by inference) himself:

Now Hillary faces an unprecedented challenge: reaching voters in 24 states in just 25 days, and she cannot do it without your help.

There has never been a challenge like this before in the history of American politics: building a national campaign in less than one month. I know that Hillary is up to it. Just look at how she won New Hampshire, with grace and passion and hard work. You’re going to see that every day when she’s president.

She’s only now building a national campaign from scratch? Please. And has any former president, and titular head of his party, directly made fundraising pitches for one candidate before? The brazenness of it is classically Clinton.

Miwa Koizumi moved to Paris, was appalled by all the trash in the streets, picked some plastic bottles up and created the above. More images here. Some background:

Inspired by aquatic animal exhibits she’d seen at zoos and aquariums, Koizumi began shaping bottles into the gorgeous and ethereal forms of jellyfish and anemone, giving them a second life as animals that live in liquid. “Sea creatures and bottles are both related to liquid and water,” she explains, and her resultant creations are indeed reminiscent of both, with bottle-bottoms artfully transformed into convincing jellyfish noggins. Though frozen in space, each “animal” is unmistakably in motion, traveling through unseen water by means of unfurling tentacles and flowing tendrils.

Not so fast.

I liked this comment:

What exactly does it take to be gay? It depends on the person, and how willing he is to actually be one.

Mark Shea responds to this excrescence from Kathryn-Jean Lopez:

As with the Dem devotion to abortion, the Right’s dalliance with torture is no longer played as an ugly thing they are ashamed to name and in a hurry to deny with euphemism. I can remember how Linda Chavez telescoped the whole Faustian process in her column a few years ago" torture. She began by calling for "rational debate" and ended with a demand that we get over our squeamishness and get on with the safe, legal and rare torture. Some of you may remember the Dems following a similar process a few years earlier with another embrace of evil.

So now, for those who wish to be "one of us" according to the canons of what used to be a conservative journal, the *first* thing you must embrace is not free speech, low taxes, the dignity of the individual, nor smaller government. No the first thing that makes you one with the alleged standard bearer of conservatism is zealous defense of Caesar’s power to torture. And in this day and age, that means Caesar’s power to torture anybody he deems an illegal combatant.

And this swinish definition of conservatism as prostitution to the power of Leviathan is used to exclude a man who heroically endured torture at the hands of the Viet Cong.

Despicable. Utterly, utterly despicable.