When She Belittles Barack For His Inspiration,
Her Own Campaign Rhetoric Begins to Sound a Bit, Well…Hollow

“My opponent offers speeches, I offer solutions.” Etc., etc.  We’ve all heard the crap. I was listening to it the other day, Hillary droning on…and on…and on…thinking to myself, good lord sweet baby jesus, haven’t you ever read the Gospel, Hillary?

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word    was with God, and the Word was God.

 Forgive me for bringing it up. I’m not a religious man and don’t profess to understand precisely what St. John the Christian had in mind at the time, but I’ve always loved that passage and decided to do a bit of research into the Greek. Am I wrong here? Setting aside the “Jesus as Christ” aspect for the moment, it does not seem to me a stretch to interpret the passage thusly.

 We know God through words. God communicates back to us through them.

And I’m not talking ten point policy papers here, Hillary, but the ability of words to speak to our hearts, to lift us up from the sometimes senseless drudgery of our daily lives, to call us out from our oft times pitiful mortal limitations and say, hey, why don’t we come together here? Let’s try to make this a better world.

 When Robert Kennedy said during his 1968 Presidential campaign, "Some men see things as they are and say, 'Why'? I dream of things that never were and say, 'Why not'?" no one took him to task for paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw. That wasn’t the point. He had inspired us, and much has been forgiven those who have used words to inspire us. We don’t think first of the John Kennedy as a womanizer. We think of the man who stood before a nation and said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

 Well, whatever else St. John had in mind at the time, to equate The Word with the very God of this universe was to lend it the same power as that which makes a flower grow up towards the sun. It was to say, plain and simple, one word can hearken to the very best of us. It was to say, one phrase can evoke in us a sudden willingness to roll up our sleeves and do what seemed completely impossible yesterday.

 As a John Edwards man now converted, I am a man who has observed Obama calling out a new generation to serve their country with complete objectivity, and I dare anyone to deny the enthusiasm with which his call to labor has been received. It is the same enthusiasm which John Kennedy once evoked from a nation. It is a hope and enthusiasm that Barack evokes so freely, and Hillary Clinton never will. All she can do is pooh-pooh Barack’s lofty turn of phrase.

 And what can she hope to achieve by this? Ironically enough, if she’s successful in claiming the nomination, it will be the diminution of her own power to inspire. Having resorted to the only apparent tool left in her shed, which is to tear him down, which in turn tears everything and everyone else down, she’ll have won a Pyrrhic victory, and have killed all inspiration in the process. Hillary can hardly slay inspiration now, only to resurrect it when it becomes expedient to her later on. Rather, she will be like the Red Queen, having beheaded everything disagreeable in her sight, with little left over when she’s done, beyond perhaps her hollow words and blind ambition.

 Having lived through the sixties, I saw the Kennedy’s shot, Martin Luther King, too, and I’m here to proclaim. I survived that with my hopes and dreams still intact. I have waited forty years for a new season of hopes and dreams and believe it is now. In fact, I’m getting up to dust myself off today, put my money where my mouth is, make another donation to the Obama campaign and offer up my services to them. Because, Hillary, you were right about one thing. We’ll be just fine. Dreams never die. Dreams never go out of style. Like flowers, they only wait for the right season to revive. Maybe if you and Bill hadn’t spent those early years calculating your every move on the way to the Presidency, you would have gotten the real message of the sixties. It was to believe in our very best selves, which has nothing to do with your Machiavellian ambition to obtain power.