Monday, October 22, 2007
Hillarity
Yeeowch! America, meet Hillary Clinton.
As the indefatiguable Zombietime points out, the Hillary-for-President campaign has every right to promote a positive image of their candidate... but the media is going out of its way to help. So Zombie has collected unflattering pictures of Hillary, on the assumption that they will be hard to find. (And yes, contributions are welcomed, it seems!)
These pictures range from the mildly embarrassing and/or unflattering...
...to the "unfortunate convergence" type...
...to the weird and wacky...
...to the downright disturbing:
And yes, I know, it's easy enough to catch any politician in an unflattering pose; certainly President Bush has been caught that way any number of times. But that's the point. With some notable exceptions, we seem to see a lot more embarrassing pictures of him than we do of Hillary.
It's going to be an interesting campaign, folks. And I think the Republicans would do well to dust off an old witticism of Adlai Stevenson's: "Hillary, the Republicans would like to make a deal with you. If you stop lying about us, we'll stop telling the truth about you."
(hat tip: LGF.)
UPDATE: Hillary's not the only one with unflattering photos, of course. Time Magazine recently ran a photo of Sen. Barack Obama:
Time's caption simply states that this was taken during the playing of the National Anthem. (There does seem to be some confusion about that; others are saying that it was during the Pledge of Allegiance. I'm quite willing to stipulate that Time got that detail right.)
Please note that Bill Richardson and Hillary Clinton understand the importance of being seen to respect the flag; Gov. Richardson is still wearing his flag pin (although Sen. Obama has famously refused to wear it).
Some bloggers are insisting that this is no big deal. I disagree. Politics is perception, as the saying goes... and the perception here, to my eyes, is of a candidate -- and a sitting U.S. Senator! -- who seemingly wants to see how far he can go before people will "question his patriotism".
Among other things, the President is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces -- and, as such, is directly in charge of hundreds of thousands of Americans who have sworn an oath to live and die for the flag. Showing the flag a small gesture of respect doesn't seem like a lot to ask. Does Sen. Obama, by refusing to do this, expect to earn the loyalty and respect of our men and women in uniform? (Or does he expect that most of them won't vote for him anyway?)
No doubt Sen. Obama doesn't expect this picture to pose a problem for him. And no doubt Sen. Clinton's campaign is already printing it on posters.
UPDATE II: Perhaps I should take it back. Unflattering pictures of Hillary don't seem to be that hard to find after all. (I note also that a Google image search pulls up all sorts of things...)
