false hopes

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Josh Marshall highlights this moment in last night's debate as significant for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

What strikes me more than Senator Clinton's much-remarked demeanour is this sentence:

We don't need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered, the best way to know what change I will produce is to look at the changes I've already made.


False hopes, what a cynical turn of phrase when you get right down to it.

You can be sure that the use of that phrase was the result of much private strategizing on the part of the Clinton team. As such, it can serve as an epitaph of all that has been wrong with Clintonism: the willingness to smear and distort when your power is challenged, the protective paternalism cloaking a not so subtle elitism, the claiming of sole credit for shared accomplishments, and, above all else, the savvy retailing of lowered expectations about what is possible.

That is the downside of the Clinton legacy in a nutshell. (And I say this as someone who admits that there are upsides as well.)

False hopes.

The Clintons do not choose words idly. That is their response to Iowa and Barack Obama.

False hopes.

A bit sad. No?

Comments

John Wesley Leek said…
A bit sad is right.
3:22 PM
Anonymous said…
Perhaps Hope has a doppelganger and that's what the Clintons are warning us about. "We're really from a place called Hope. He's just from a fake imitation."

No? Yeah, it is sad.
8:40 PM
poetsandpatriots said…
a great new independent ad for NH eve

http://youtube.com/watch?v=0ZBPMKyyaBA
3:05 PM
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