A Nomination Race About Issues?

After several days of very long work hours and minimal television viewing, I’m suddenly aware that the country has been obsessed with a video clip of water welling up in Hillary Clinton’s eyes and deconstructing the fluid’s political significance— in overdrive. Some have written and spoken volumes about the moment. I wonder if we might spill a similar amount of ink on her healthcare program, or her willingness to support the Iraq invasion until it became a political liability, or her position on funding for No Child Left Behind.

Now that Ms. Clinton has proved herself viable anew in New Hampshire, will we see a renewed interest in the issues and programs that separate her from the other contenders? Do we think perhaps we’ll find ourselves debating which path America must take to clean up the mess of the last seven years of radical right-wing abominations? We can hope in some circles we might, but Glenn Greenwald points out the futility of expecting the puditocracy to be the ones to lead us out of sound-bite summaries and handicapping the race as a substitute for covering it.

Are Gloria Borger and Chris Matthews and Howard
Fineman and Wolf Blitzer suddenly going to
abandon their desire to impose shallow,
melodramatic narratives on our elections and
spend their time, instead, analyzing the candidates'
responses to Charlie Savage's questionnaire on presi-
dential power, or the dominant, corrosive role
lobbyists and large corporations play in our political
culture, or the widening rich-poor gap, or the strain
and stain on our country from our imperial
policies? The question is so absurd, so laughable,
that to ask it is to answer it.

Maybe the country itself is now starved enough for solutions that many primary voters, at least, will look elsewhere for background. The small idiocy of Tweety and his ilk showing Clinton’s watery eyes over and over doesn’t seem to have charmed New Hampshire voters into throwing her over the side— and may actually have played a role in her resurgence.

Yes, we can hope for better, but maybe we better not hold our breath expecting it to come from the mainstream media…