Andy Ihnatko explains that Hillary, with the loan to her own campaign, is now akin to a vanity author: publishing a book that nobody wants, simply as an ego exercise. (Not to be confused with self-publishing, because that's a lot different).
But the Vanity authors insist that they’re writing their own checks because the massive Publishing Machine is unfair and elitist and out of touch with American tastes and needs and damn them for denying the public their chance to see what you can do.
It’s a fab delusion. It makes the whole house smell like an apple pie is baking somewhere. That’s one of the reasons why most people go that route in the first place.
Yesterday everyone found out that Hillary Clinton wrote a $6,400,000 check to her own campaign to keep it afloat until the next round of primaries.
In my mind, Hillary Clinton has become a Vanity Candidate.
She can’t convince a crucial legion of people to like her campaign enough to keep it moving forward to the next step. Like many authors, she got through some of the hurdles, but as the obstacles got progressively higher and harder, she found fewer and fewer people willing to skin their knees and cut their hands scrambling to get over them. To the contrary, her greatest allies are now reaching for the Bactine and the Band-Aids and muttering about needing to get home to paint the children or vacuum a sick relative.
[From Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) » Vanity Prez]
[snipped bit about Al Gore]
Hillary had that same opportunity for a display of greatness, a chance to plant an arrow in the ground that marked the moment when she truly came into her own as a national politician. Withdrawing from the race and committing her supporters and resources to Obama wouldn’t have been as conceding an election that she had already actually won by popular vote, but it still would have been hot stuff. She could have come back in eight years, even stronger than before.
But nope, she let the opportunity slide right on past her. She wrote the check and increased the rhetoric. She’s proven that in its current form, her campaign is a vanity production. A campaign based not on service but on ego, and a bad sports cliche: I can win, no matter the odds or the cost; I just have to prove that I want it a little more than the other guy.
She can’t change the numbers, so she’ll try to change the math. If she can’t change the math, she’ll try to change the process. And if she can’t change the process…well, God help any Obama supporter if she runs some numbers on how she’d fare against a Republican incumbent in 2012 and likes what she sees.
Which is a pretty big damned shame. Obama’s candidacy has the national authority and support of a new Neil Gaiman novel. Obama isn’t just in Barnes & Noble…he’s on the end-cap, with a special display including a life-sized cutout of the man with a button in his nose you press to hear one of eleven sayings.
