Hillary

I'm not a Hillary Clinton fan, and apparently neither is Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone:

I FIRST HEARD JOHN KERRY float his "national conversation" schtick in Dover, New Hampshire, sometime in November 2003. I remember it clearly because while I usually used Kerry speeches as opportunities to catch up on lost sleep, this one had me awake from the start because it was so bizarre. After months of looking like a stiff, disinterested creep, Kerry suddenly came bounding out onstage, goofily caressing the mic like Phil Donahue, imploring the audience that "I really want to have a conversation with you." ....

That was John Kerry in a nutshell. He decided to take the big step of inviting his audience to examine him as a person and search out the glistening originality of his character not two seconds after trotting out a "let's have a conversation" line that was not only a hideously worn old saw of Democratic campaign speechery, but was also a bald concoction of the party's corporate PR slaves at the Democratic Leadership Council, which had been hosting an annual "National Conversation" conference since 1997. The DLC's national conversation was actually a series of strategic meetings and plenary sessions between the group's member-elected officials and its more prominent (i.e. monied corporate) members; the council's idea of a "national conversation" was probably Bruce Reed and Evan Bayh hitting the links with a pair of Union Carbide executives.

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton announced her run for president last week. Now it was her turn to slip the "national conversation" line four sentences into her first speech as a national presidential candidate. You have to wonder what it says about a political candidate when she runs out of her own ideas less than fifty words into her national sojourn.

Actually, it took less time than that; the very first lines of her speech ("I'm in. And I'm in to win") were a cheap ripoff of Disney teenie idol Corbin Bleu's "Push It to the Limit" lyrics. Think about that: In preparation for what was clearly the biggest and most important speech of her life to date, Hillary Clinton sat down, plucked the inspirational top from a crappy teenie boy-band song, and then plunged right into a student-body-right regurgitation of DLC focus-group campaign gobbledygook, rhetoric that was still bruised and squashed quite flat from the pounding it took on the Kerry campaign trail two years ago. This was her way of introducing the future President Clinton's "new ideas" to the world.

...Kerry used to be the master of the focus-word-list style of campaign speechifying ("My fellow citizens, elections are about choices. And choices are about values..."), but Hillary blows Kerry away. You seldom caught Kerry lumping more than four focus words into a sentence, but check out Hillary's penultimate line. It's a six-word list: Principles, values, new ideas, energy, leadership, challenge. In fact the only focus words that Hillary left out of her speech, as far as I can tell, were freedom, pride, and truth. The key words -- values, principles, change, heroes, future, etc. -- were mostly all double- or triple-represented.

... Had Hillary embraced head-on her undeniable role as an unwitting martyr/archetype for the modern professional woman, had she opened up her campaign by actually showing us what her private thoughts have been throughout all of these trying times, and what she might think the meaning of her journey has been or could be, she would have instantly established herself as an extraordinarily interesting and compelling story, at the very least. Instead, Hillary is clearly so spooked by the experience of not being taken seriously by the Beltway establishment that she's gone overboard in the direction of being a typical Inside-Baseball, full-of-shit Washington hack, spraying cardboard cliches like machine-gun fire. She's Joe Biden without the plugs.