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

“…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.

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.

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?

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.