Stateside with Rosalea Barker
Yes she won’t
National Building Museum. Glass ceiling. Get it? National Building Museum. Architects. Of their own defeat? Was the
choice of venue for Clinton’s speech a sly dig at those in the Democratic Party who have switched allegiance ? As a
graphic on one local news station said on Saturday evening: Obama was first mentioned seven minutes into the speech.
There’s just something I’m not quite buying about Senator Clinton’s saying “I suspend my campaign.” Perhaps it’s the
words of the New Hampshire voter I spoke to last year—white, female, independent voter, owner of a small business—who
told me the reason she wouldn’t vote for Clinton was that she didn’t trust her. So, is the lady suspending her campaign
to save money while still working on having her supporters cause a ruckus at the convention in August?
Saturday’s speech was scheduled to begin at 9 am here in the West—a time when most channels are airing children’s shows.
In fact, it didn’t start until 9:45. Who knows why? Hopefully not some tit-for-tat because Obama arrived 30 minutes late
for The Secret Meeting at Dianne Feinstein’s house earlier in the week. Maybe I’m reading way too much into the venue
and timing, but it’s hard not to be skeptical.
Despite the late start, all the local channels except for the Fox affiliate carried the speech live. Again, ABC chose to
take the national network feed, which meant that instead of the whole speech being broadcast, George Stephanopoulos and
Charles Gibson cut it off part-way through to do their commentary instead. Do they think their audience is so stupid
they can’t make up their own minds about what’s being said?
It was disrespectful to the candidate, too. I’m beginning to have some sympathy with Harold Ickes, Jr, (the
superdelegate wrangler on Sen. Clinton’s campaign) who, as President Clinton’s deputy chief of staff, used to get
“pissed off” with seeing Stephanopoulos (at that time a senior advisor to the President) “sitting there with his f***ing
feet on the table, and he would sit that way when Bill Clinton would come in and sit down.” (Quoted in Air Force One.)
Sen. Clinton’s reference to her husband winning two of the only three Presidential elections Democrats have won in the
last forty years sounded less like a rallying call to overcome a great challenge than it did an opportunity for her to
reinforce the experience vs. change argument. She prefaced it by saying, “I’ve been involved in politics and public life
in one way or another for four decades.” Jolly good. On the campaign trail she said “35 years” so I guess that gets it
into the four-decade category if you’re counting decades as discrete units rather than the ten actual years they consist
of.
She said people asked, “Could a woman really serve as Commander-in-Chief? Well, I think we answered that one.” Huh? It’s
not a question that can be answered until the person is in the White House, surely. “If we can blast 50 women into
space, we will someday launch a woman into the White House,” she continued.
Maybe I can’t count, but it seems to me that if you add together the number of women who are former or deceased astronauts to the number listed by NASA as having flight experience among the group of active astronauts, it comes to 21. But then, Clinton didn’t say there have been 50 female astronauts, just that the U.S. has
blasted 50 women into space—presumably the rest of them are from other countries.
Here’s an idea: make that 51!
*************
--PEACE--