no matter what she says, it's spun into something negative.....no one does this with obama. i'm not even sure who i support yet because i like aspects of both of their platforms, but i seriously am sick of people picking on clinton all the time. obama's priest is a racist creep but i only heard 50+ people dissing that; young supporters just seemed to turn the other cheek...

I'm not sure Obama doesn't also have this sort of thing done to him. People wanted to turn a nose scratch into a bird-flipping for crying out loud.

It's tough not to spin this into something negative--the gas tax cut is a dumb idea, and her defense of it is equally dumb. The gas tax cut just won't save people very much money. The Federal gas tax is 18 cents; assuming a car that gets 20 miles to the gallon and a person who drives 10,000 miles in a year, you're talking about savings of $90 over the course of the next twelve months. The economic stimulus checks going out right now dwarf that, and they aren't going to have much effect on the economy either.

And this is a relatively common thing with her--she's got a talent for saying stupid things that, while not close to the talent our beloved W. seems to have, is still pretty well developed.

The difference between this and Obama's pastor is that this is something the candidate is proposing. Guilt by association is a losing game no matter how you slice it. If Obama were espousing the same divisive ideas that Wright does, you'd have a point, but he isn't.

Going after him over his comments about people being bitter is closer to the mark, and people generally and the media specifically did go after him over those comments (although for the most part I agree with what he said there).

i am just generalizing...i realize that obama's pastor-of-choice mishap is not the same situation as an actual tax proposal...but i just feel like she gets a lot more flack in every aspect of this campaign so far in comparison to him and even McCain. the anti-hillary sentiment is super duper high; even before she decided to run. i feel like people have taken to making fun of her over Bush. even when she's having a good month and doesn't happen to say anything too off the mark, then someone will talk about her hair or her clothes. it's just retarded. i understand this is politics and that's how it goes most of the time; but this is just my own personal experience so far.....PICK ON HILARY, LOVE OBAMA NO MATTER WHAT. i'm not saying there aren't people unjustly (or justly) picking on him.... i'm just not coming across it.

Yes, there's a lot of anti-Hillary sentiment--which is part of what makes her a rotten choice for the Democrats. The flak she's catching now is nothing compared to what she would get from the right wing if she were somehow to get the nomination. This isn't a new thing, either--she's been disliked, especially by even moderate Republicans, since the 1990s. I'd argue that the only more divisive possible woman the Democrats could pick as their first female Presidential candidate would be the supremely unelectable Cynthia McKinney.

i am starting to wonder if any woman has a chance. i can't think of a woman who is not divisive or widely disliked in politics. or who isn't bashed for her looks.


but yes:

doesn't get much worse.

I'm about 70% sure that the first female President will have to be a Republican, which is shitty.

Clinton's political problems are certainly exacerbated by the fact that she's a woman (and let me be clear here: I'm not saying that she's less capable because she's a woman, but rather that I think fewer people will vote for her because she's a woman), but her biggest problem with swing voters is that she's remembered not as a politician in her own right but (fairly or not) as Bill Clinton's shrewish wife.

Condi Rice is probably one of the least divisive members of the current administration. If she were serious, she'd have a decent chance of being McCain's running mate, and would be an asset more than a liability.

Kathleen Sebelius isn't widely known, but she appears to be more unifying than divisive, among those who know of her.

In as much as she's "in politics," I think Ruth Bader Ginsberg is more liked and less divisive than most of the rest of SCOTUS. Granted, that puts her compared to Scalia and Thomas, which is an easy competition.

There are others, like Debbie Stabenow, who aren't actively disliked by sizable groups of people, being more burdened by relative obscurity than anything else.

no one does this with obama

Er, what? It was a comment from Obama that started the recent use of "elite" as a dirty word in this campaign in the first place (his use of "cling" to refer to passionate opinions of the good folk of PA).

The whole gas tax proposal is a dumb idea. If they charge the tax to the big oil companies, instead, they will just up the price of gas to cover it.

The only thing that might work is is they froze gas prices with increases indexed to any rises in oil prices.

I think the gas tax "holiday" idea is stupid. Permanently eliminating the tax is one thing. People can then adjust their lives accordingly. Or leave it as is, and people can adjust to the new reality of high gas prices. But taking a few months off from paying this tax won't change anybody's long term behavior or do them any good.

It's the same thing with the stimulus checks. Fine. Everybody gets a one-time bonus. But my budget isn't going to change. What's going to change is when the tax cuts expire in a couple of years and I get an automatic tax increase because of it. If we're going to rely on consumer behavior to influence the economy (which is a silly way to run a country, anyway), give us some way to reliably plan for incorporating the new tax policies into our lives.

I agree, this drove me crazy.

Sure, economists are wrong a lot, but just dismissing them altogether seems the height of political pandering and reeks of desperation - "I'll say anything to win and look different".