The Working Girl

The closest The Hillster ever came to hard work was the time she spent on the Wal-Mart Board of Directors. During her tenure with the giant retailer, based in (surprise, surprise) Bentonville, Arkansas, Wal-Mart was notorious for its labor practices, including the hiring of undocumented workers into peonage in terms of wages below the legal minimum, hours beyond the legal maximum, and a total absence of health insurance. Where was this heroine of "the working man (and woman)" at that time? Saying nothing, applauding profit reports, and collecting an annual director's fee for her "hard work" in behalf of Wal-Mart. In terms of "hard work," (as they say in Arkansas and other centers of redheck culture) that dog won't hunt. Today, The Krait sticks it to The Hillster. If this is (fair & balanced) facetiousness, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
A Victory Plan For Hillary
By Gail Collins

Hillary Clinton scored a whopping victory in West Virginia. Trounced Barack Obama, who is consistently described as the inevitable presidential nominee.

Hard to know exactly what to do with this information.

Ever since the North Carolina primary (which was only last week, although it does feel as though it happened around 1947) the Democratic establishment has been sending out word that Clinton has a perfect right to run out the rest of the election schedule as long as she doesn’t say anything mean about the Chosen One.

So she has to campaign on the theme of Barack is terrific — and he must be stopped! Not the easiest message in the world, but it’s been working out, more or less. Hillary and Bill and the rest of the gang have been behaving so beautifully in recent days that the party’s leaders have been tiptoeing around as if it was quiet time at the nursery.

(The correct response to her 67-to-26-percent victory in West Virginia, by the way, is supposed to be: “Well, isn’t it nice she’s having a good moment. And so close to Mother’s Day.”)

If she’s only going through the motions, it’s hard to tell. “I can win this nomination if you decide I should,” Hillary told her rapturous supporters at her victory party. She went on to congratulate Barack for “a hard-fought race” in West Virginia, even though Obama’s strategy seemed to involve pretending it was not actually a state. By primary night his campaign had been lowering expectations so energetically that coming in ahead of John Edwards might have been regarded as an exceptional achievement.

If Clinton wants to continue, there’s $11 million that says she has paid for the right to go the distance. But is it hopeless? Not entirely. Given the Democratic Party’s innovative method of doling out delegates, all that’s necessary for her to snatch the nomination is:

1. A big, big win in Kentucky next Tuesday. Ideally, Obama should be limited to no more than 100 votes.


2. Oregon, scheduled for the same day, inexplicably breaks off and sinks into the Pacific Ocean.


3. Puerto Rico, clocking in on June 1, not only gives Clinton a huge majority, but also manages to become a state in advance of the vote.


4. Finally, on June 3 as the South Dakota polls open, Thomas Jefferson’s head on Mount Rushmore comes to life and starts shouting, “You go, girl.”

An ambitious scenario, true. But nothing less than we’ve come to expect from the most hard-working political family in American history.

“Now, there are some who have wanted to cut this race short. They say, ‘Give up. It’s too hard,’ ” Hillary said Tuesday night. This is obviously a fiction. Nobody who wanted her to stop running would ever say, “It’s too hard.” Hillary loves impossible obstacles. If you were trying to be genuinely persuasive, you’d go with something like: “Look, keep spending like this and you and Bill will be down to your last 401(k) by July.”

Hillary’s tendency to describe herself and her supporters as “hard-working” is getting a little irritating. True, we are all in awe of her energy. True, Barack talks about how he’s been running for president for nearly a year and a half as if that was somehow an undesirable way to spend a considerable chunk of the human life span. But she’s making it sound as if the mere effort of pulling the lever for her instead of him is a demonstration of a superior work ethic. Her voters are “all of the hard-working men and women who defy the odds to build a better life for themselves and their children.” His, presumably, are living off their grandfathers’ trust funds and refusing to commit to their girlfriends.

If, as is projected, Hillary wins Kentucky and loses Oregon next week, are we supposed to think that it’s because people in Portland don’t work as hard as people in Louisville? Oregonians do have a reputation for being kind of laid back, but they do not put billboards on the highway saying, “Welcome to the State that Likes a Good Nap.”

On West Virginia primary night, Hillary listed the folks who need her to fight hard for them because “they’re fighting so hard every single day,” and she ticked off everybody from waitresses to coal miners to “the trucker, the soldier, the vet, the college student ...” While there are certainly college students working three jobs to get themselves through school, I guarantee you that when it comes to intensive labor, undergraduates as a group do not rank in the top 20.

Politicians, unless they are very cynical, tend to believe that their supporters are a lot like them. Barack probably feels his are sort of cool, and unusually smart.

Hillary’s folk, then, would be really, really, really driven. “We know people have to work hard,” she noted, somewhat unnecessarily.

[Gail Collins joined the New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an op-ed columnist. In 2001 she became the first woman ever appointed editor of the Times editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and began a leave in order to finish a sequel to her book, America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines. She returned to The Times as a columnist in July 2007.

Before joining the Times, Ms. Collins was a columnist at New York Newsday and the New York Daily News, and a reporter for United Press International. Her first jobs in journalism were in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau, which provided coverage of the state capitol and Connecticut politics. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than 30 weekly and daily newspaper chains.

Besides America's Women," which is about American women since 1960 and was published in 2003, Gail Collins is the author of Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celebrity and American Politics, and The Millennium Book," which she co-authored with her husband, Dan Collins.]
Copyright © 2008 The New York Times Company

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