For the first time in years, Hillary Clinton says something honest and funny that made me smile. Is it surprising that the media don’t know how to react, and run around in rapidly shrinking hermeneutic circles in attempt to make sense of this phenomenon? No, it is not surprising.
It’s a joke, people! A pretty good joke, actually. Good for her.
The coverage of this isn’t too difficult to understand. Coverage of politics is approaching the coverage of sports, pro football in particular. The true political season, like a football season, is relatively short. But now, we make a tremendous issue out of an insignificant campaign statement (but a pretty good joke) made more than twelve months before any votes will be cast in any primary and more than twenty months before we decide who the next President will be. The pro football analogy is continuous offseason coverage of the draft and the free agent market. Just like 24-hour sports channels, 24-hour news networks need a constant supply of events to report about, even if they really don’t mean much in the bigger scheme of things.
And just like football games, we now have political reporters and analysts dissecting statements in immense detail, as if they were John Madden showing you eight different replays of the same play and telling you how this lineman missed a block and that safety took the wrong angle on the receiver.
I just wish Hillary had simply admitted the joke. It might have allowed her to defuse an issue that I still think lingers for some voters out there–why did she stay with Bill through his marital infidelities? I think a lot of voters simply assume the worst–that she wanted to stay close to power, an assumption that reinforces her negatives. I think if she had answered questions with a smile and the rhetorical question, “who do you think I was talking about?”, she could have conveyed another message that a lot of people (and maybe more importantly a lot of women) would understand: “Sure, I married a lunkhead, but he’s my lunkhead.”
Faux News????
Im not sure if I understand the joke in all this? Of course, people where laughing because its obvious to make a connection to Bill but so what?
It’s a bit like the Colbert skit; she probably meant the GOP politicians, Starr and his crew, and their media accomlices. I use the term ‘accomplices’ because the mass media overwhelmingly accepted and promoted every lie that the GOP put out, even after they were disproven.
Your right Sean, Hillary finally spoke the truth …
The BIG deal? she is wishing to run for President of the United States, not of sixth grade.