Psychasthenia

Maha over at the Mahablog has an excellent post discussing why certain liberals hope Clinton loses. It isn't because we hate her, or hate her positions, but rather we remember her (and her husband's) long history of "finding middle ground with conservatives."

In those few places where [Obama] and Senator Clinton disagree, I actually have a slight preference for her positions over his. I’ve voted for her both times she’s run for U.S. Senator, and I met her once and thought she was charming.

But she has a long history of betraying progressive interests for her own political interests, and her strengths lie less in shaking up the system than in finessing it, sort of. Her claims of being ready to lead on “day one” have been belied by the fact that her campaign is a mess, and it’s a mess largely of her own making. She listens to the wrong people; she’s been slow to replace incompetent staff; she often seems tone deaf to public mood. Further, I think her resume is way too padded and her senatorial legislative accomplishments are way too thin. She fights and fights, yes, but she doesn’t win much.

Now, those are reasons. But I know that underneath those reasons is a strong sensation of certainty that I really, really do not [want] Senator Clinton to be the nominee. I’ve had this sensation of certainty since the last presidential election, when the bobbleheads began to talk up Hillary as the sure-fire Democratic nominee in 2008. A big part of that sensation came from her Iraq War resolution vote and her early support for the Iraq War. She was one of the most hawkish Dems in the Senate for a long time after the 2002 vote. When we really needed her, she let us down.

But I know another part of it is long-smoldering resentment for the Clinton Triangulation Strategy, in which both Bill and Hillary often dissed the Left to mess with the Right. And the whole “inevitability” narrative really burned me. Since early 2005, if not sooner, Chris Matthews et al. have been chirping at us that Hillary Clinton would be the nominee. Like us little citizen-persons had nothing to say about it.

[Click to read the rest of this substantive post The Mahablog » The Poison of Certainty]

Oh, also borrowed today's Word of the Day from The Mahablog. You'll have to read the entire post to figure out why.