Anne Applebaum notes that Sarah Palin breaks the Hillary mold of the powerful woman politician, but not just in the narrow ideological sense:

In the end, though, it is not just Palin’s large family and important job which have made her the topic of the day at every school pick-up queue in America. It is also the fact that she breaks the Hillary Clinton mould, not only in personality and lifestyle but in ideology as well. By this, I don’t mean merely that she’s a conservative, that she’s an evangelical Christian, or that she opposes abortion. More interesting are the ways in which she shatters all of the stereotypes altogether: Left/Right, Democrat/Republican, liberal/conservative. In practice, it isn’t even easy to say on which side of America’s increasingly confusing culture wars she stands. Is it “Right-wing” to go back to work two days after having a baby, as she did while governor? It is “feminist” to support one’s unwed daughter’s decision to have her baby? Is it liberal or conservative for women to play sports or drive snowmobiles? Or is it the case that, especially where women are concerned, none of these categories were [ever] as rigid as politicians have sometimes made them seem? While I wouldn’t say that women like Palin are a dime a dozen, in real life there are plenty of conservative women with full-time jobs and post-feminist lifestyles, just as there are plenty of liberal or Left-wing women who decide to stay home with their children.

And this is only part of the reason I would have loved to have waited until 2012 to back Sarah Palin for President.

“Screw ‘em,” she said. Fucking white trash doesn’t know what’s good for it.

It’s not the sentiment, mind you. It’s the duplicity that rankles.

As of last night, I was tired of the race. This morning, I’m as keen as ever. Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, brings the swagger:

“…If Sen. Clinton wants to take the debate to various places, we’ll join that debate. We’ll do it on our terms and in our own way, but if she wants to make issues like ethics and disclosure and law firms and real estate deals and all that stuff issues, as I’ve said before, I don’t know why they’d want to go there, but I guess that’s where they’ll take the race.”

Excellent. I love a good bloodbath.

It might be that I’m still sick today (and have been for almost a week now), but I found Maureen Dowd’s column today to be wonderfully savage. The object of her derision is no surprise: Hillary.

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.” He added dryly: “Crying doesn’t usually work in campaigns. Only in relationships.”

…

She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

Yeah, I have no love for Clinton either. But another detail in the piece did make me prick up my ears:

When Hillary hecklers yelled “Iron my shirt!” at her in Salem on Monday, it stirred sisterhood.

Not just sisterhood—that kind of shit gets even my cynical back up. Can you imagine hecklers at an Obama rally yelling “pick my cotton!” at him while he tries to speak? The truth of the matter is that nasty public sexism like that is tolerated whereas public displays of racism, at least at an Obama rally, would probably get the perpetrators properly beat up.

Though I’m not making an argument for electing Clinton based on her gender, I certainly can see more clearly why she might have seen an uptick in support in the last moments of the New Hampshire race.

Richard Holbrooke always seemed to be a particularly clear-headed type. His To End A War is a classic case study in how muscular diplomacy can and should be waged. Though the end result of his efforts, the Dayton peace accords, left much to be desired, Holbrooke’s aggressiveness and single-mindedness allowed America to bring peace to the Balkans despite the staggering inefficacy of its European allies. For better or for worse, it helped re-establish America as the indispensable power in Europe for at least another decade.

Some well-placed critics have convincingly argued that Holbrooke could (and likely would) have solved the Balkan crisis definitively had his boss Bill Clinton given him wider latitude. Given that he’s rumored to be Hillary’s choice for Secretary of State, and given the likelihood that Hillary would be keener than her husband to prove her toughness in international affairs, reading Holbrooke today should give us insight as to what Hillary’s foreign policy might look like.

Helpfully enough, in today’s Washington Post, Holbrooke offers up a blueprint for how America ought to tackle Kosovo. He identifies Serbia as the irrationally intransigent actor, and blames Russia for stoking nationalist and separatist sentiments in the region. His solution is for Bush to make an impassioned plea to Putin to back off, while at the same time bolstering NATO’s presence in the region to signal that we mean business.

One can have valid concerns about the consequences of such a policy. Though Serbia’s claims to Kosovo are spurious and largely illegitimate, Kosovo today is a corrupt enclave whose independence would destabilize neighboring Macedonia, a country with its own secessionist Albanian population. Are we empowering Albanian expansionism in the medium term?

Holbrooke is unconcerned. He sees Russia’s meddling as the root cause of problems in the region, and seems to identify Russia as an important adversary of the West. His willingness to use shows of military force to underscore the seriousness of his negotiating demands should also be noted.

Overall, I admire the man, and I think he’s largely correct about the situation in the Balkans, as well as in his determination to check this newly aggressive Russian stance in the world. I think I might be warming to a Hillary presidency. But is America ready for such a forceful administration coming on the heels of the bumbling Bush years?

Since I don’t own a TV, I get to miss the debates. Therefore I tend not to get as annoyed directly by them as some people. Instead, I end up getting annoyed based on YouTube clips, morning NPR wrap-ups and stills like the one on the right.

Clinton would probably not be the worst president, but good god do I viscerally dislike her. Her laugh, her demeanor, her fakeness all drive me up the wall. She’s like Bill without the charm.

The thing is, it’s quite likely that my assessments, based as they are on second-hand, edited material, are no less valid than those of people who actually sit through these things in their entirety. The debates are set up to be as vapid as possible—a venue for sound-byte grandstanding.¹ It’s a sad state of affairs.