Posted, November 19, 2007

The Myth of the Polarizing Hillary

NBC Today Show’s Ann Curry recently took a trip to the South Pole. She was on a fact-finding mission in search of the source who started the rumor that Hillary Clinton is a polarizing figure and can never be elected president. It took Ms. Curry days to arrive at the Pole, and, alas, after all of her efforts, she never found the source of the Polar-izing rumor.

The intrepid reporter might have spared herself the trip to the SECOND coldest place on earth. And, heck, she might have saved a lot of costly jet fuel, as well, if only she’d looked in her own backyard.  Well, not exactly her own backyard, but, maybe Karl Rove’s. For surely this rumor now circulating as COLD, hard fact sounds like a chapter out of the Rove Republican Rumor-mill, and has been finessed with the skill typical of the Republican Party’s Rove-ing Reporter.

Rove, by the way, just roved over to Newsweek as its newest polarizing pundit just in time to build on the story that he and his buddies so adeptly started from the igloo on
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – THE coldest place on earth. The snow-White House is where the current occupants and their little elves ruthlessly plotted to severely maim The Children’s Health Insurance Program that Mrs. Clinton helped establish when she was Arkansas’s First Lady, heartlessly under-funded the Veteran's Administration, and turned their backs on the fuel crisis because it’s too hot to handle.   

‘Tis not the season to be cold and calculating and fuel the myth that Hillary Clinton is too polarizing a figure to be elected President of the United States -- a rumor that has snowballed with little if any reality behind it. The reporter to coin the phrase was of all people, Todd Purdum, (married to warm and fuzzy former Clinton operative Dee Dee Meyers) when in 1995, he called Clinton “a complex and polarizing figure following the failure of her health care reform initiative. To Karl Rove and his Republican Reindeer (look, the holidays are here) the fact that it was the issue that was polarizing and not Mrs. Clinton didn't matter. The phrase was poetic. . .On Bushee! On Boehner! On! Cheney! On Coulter! With their sleigh full of the toys of rumor and innuendo they dashed off to every evening snowball fight on CNN, MSNBC and FOXX-redcoat-news. What’s the old story, if you say something enough times it becomes the truth?

Look, Bush is polarizing, Cheney, too, but Hillary? I don’t think so. I think she’s many things and not all of them good. But polarizing is not a fair description. She’s a woman who is smart, and determined, powerful and accomplished. And whether you agree with her politics or not, she has dared to tackle some of the biggest issues our country has faced from health care where she wasn’t successful, to Bill Clinton, to whom she’s still married, but let’s not take a sleigh ride there.

So, let’s talk turkey. . .the problem with Mrs. Clinton isn’t at all that’s she’s polarizing. The problem  (only in terms of her ability to be elected president) is that she is that bright, accomplished WOMAN  and the word polarizing is being used as a disguise for what SOME people really want to call her.

But I won’t go there either. It’s almost Thanksgiving.

                           
   ~ Halli