Michael Tomasky sums up the ludicrous Mitt Romney, now departed.

Romney is proof that elections aren’t only about ideological openings. His problem was that he just wasn’t a persuasive person. Everything about him and his campaign seemed a little insincere. He was a liberal Republican in the 1990s, and now he’s a straight down the line wingnut. Early in the campaign he was about leadership, or something. Then, when he saw that Barack Obama was catching on with this “change” thing, suddenly he was about change. Then, when that didn’t quite take, he was about fixing Washington. There was a most recent fourth iteration that I’ve wiped from my memory.

So he was kind of a fake all along, and apparently not just to this liberal. I always thought that he was hurt very badly by his lame answer last year when he was asked by a citizen (an anti-war activist of some kind) why, if he was so gung-ho about the Iraq war and war in general, not one of his five sons – all draft age – had volunteered to serve in the armed forces. He replied in part that “one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected because they think I’d be a great president.” I should think that equating the willingness to get a paper burn stuffing envelopes with the willingness to be blown to bits halfway around the world was a bit much especially for conservatives.

So off he goes. He is not of great interest, and I have trouble imagining we’ll have to worry about him again in four years or eight.

Jason Horowitz has written a scary piece in GQ about the hatred that some people feel for Hillary Clinton.

By now, Clinton’s flaws as a candidate are well-known—the problems giving a straight answer, the warmth and authenticity issues—but they’re also fairly typical for a politician. Here in Dallas, though, and in the rest of anti-Hillary land, the hostility toward Clinton tends to be expressed in bafflingly vague and emotional terms. Discussions with self-declared enemies of Hillary Clinton, prominent and not, across the country yield a head-spinning barrage of motivations for their ill will, but one thing is immediately clear: Few if any have anything to do with the mandated insurance coverage of Clinton’s health care plan (or HillaryCare, in hater parlance), her carefully triangulated position on Iran, or her incremental shift against the war in Iraq.

Instead, they say she is an extremist left-wing flower child masquerading as a moderate, or a warmongering hawk disguised as a liberal. She’s a liar and a lesbian (short hair! pantsuits!), a cold fish and an adulteress. She has no maternal instincts and is hobbled by a debilitating case of insecurity, for which she compensates by acting like a thug. She is the spineless wife of a habitual cheat, and the willful enabler of her husband’s affairs. She’s in politics to keep Bill around, and she ran for the Senate, and then the presidency, to exact revenge for his philandering. She has no God, or her devoutness is frighteningly fundamentalist. She’s a condescending elitist who sees people—even her friends—as steps on a stairway to the presidency. She is a partisan, a panderer, the personification of everything that is wrong with America.

She is, to them, an empty vessel into which they can pour everything they detest about politicians, ambitious women, and an American culture they fear is being wrested from their control.

“The closest analogy”, writes Stanley Fish in the NYT,

“is to anti-Semitism. But before you hit the comment button, I don’t mean that the two are alike either in their significance or in the damage they do. It’s just that they both feed on air and flourish independently of anything external to their obsessions. Anti-Semitism doesn’t need Jews and anti-Hillaryism doesn’t need Hillary, except as a figment of its collective imagination. However this campaign turns out, Hillary-hating, like rock ‘n’ roll, is here to stay.

All of which means that, if Hillary becomes president, some of these loons will try to assassinate her.

Vigorous column by Maureen Dowd:

Hillary’s strategist Mark Penn argued last week that because the voters have “very limited information” about Obama, the Republican attack machine would tear him down and he would lose the support of independents. Then Penn tried to point the way to negative information on Obama, just to show that Obama wouldn’t be able to survive Republicans pointing the way to negative information.

As she talked Sunday to George Stephanopoulos, a former director of the formidable Clinton war room, Hillary’s case boiled down to the fact that she can be Trouble, as they say about hard-boiled dames in film noir, when Republicans make trouble.

“I have been through these Republican attacks over and over and over again, and I believe that I’ve demonstrated that much to the dismay of the Republicans, I not only can survive, but thrive,” she said.

And on Tuesday night she told supporters, “Let me be clear: I won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.

Bill is propelled by Cheneyesque paranoia, as well. His visceral reaction to Obama — from the “fairy tale” line to the inappropriate Jesse Jackson comparison — is rooted less in his need to see his wife elected than in his need to see Obama lose, so that Bill’s legacy is protected. If Obama wins, he’ll be seen as the closest thing to J. F. K. since J. F. K. And J. F. K. is Bill’s hero.

Lovely piece by Gary Yonge.

The web of wealth and family connections that has levered Bush to power and has since characterised his administration is an indictment of America’s political culture. “George W Bush was named [after] a father who excelled at everything,” argued Bush Jr’s former speechwriter David Frum. “He tried everything his father tried – and well into his 40s, succeeded at almost nothing.”

Therapy could have dealt with this quite effectively. Instead we have been afflicted with one of the most ostentatious and wrong-headed affirmative action programmes known to the western world, in which a man unburdened by imagination inherited – almost literally – a cabinet unburdened by merit.

His father’s secretary of state (James Baker) oversaw the Florida recount in 2000 as chief legal adviser and was instrumental in taking the case to the supreme court. Once installed, Bush took his father’s joint chief of staff (Colin Powell) and made him secretary of state; his father’s defence secretary (Dick Cheney) became vice-president; his father’s special assistant on national security affairs (Condoleezza Rice) became national security adviser; and in a fit of oedipal petulance, he took one of his dad’s enemies (Donald Rumsfeld) and made him defence secretary.

Not only did such appointments set new lows for cronyism, sleaze, dysfunction and incompetence. But by drawing leadership from such a tiny gene puddle they reflected an aberration of the very democratic impulses and meritocratic culture with which most Americans identify and apparently cherish.

“It is easy to see that the rich have a great distaste for their country’s democratic institutions,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in his classic 19th century treatise, Democracy in America. “The people are a power whom they fear and scorn.” But recently the people and the rich seem to have come to an accommodation over the stewardship of their democracy. Having dispensed with the tyranny of kings more than two centuries ago, the populace now seems to have taken to electing its own monarchy. In all of this Bush is an easy, if apt, target. For the sclerosis in America’s political class is pervasive and profound. Today Jimmy Hoffa (the Teamsters union leader), Richard Daley (the Chicago mayor) and Martin Luther King (the Southern Christian Leadership Conference head) all carry the names and job titles their fathers did; 5% of senators are doing the jobs their daddies did; and the speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is herself a congressman’s daughter…

Puts Mrs Clinton in context, eh?

Michael Tomasky has a terrific essay in today’s Guardian about the significance of this year’s election.

The grand theme of this contest, to hear the candidates tell it, is “change.” That’s a shallow buzzword that doesn’t say much, and to listen to the candidates strain to persuade the public that “I represent change too!” (Obama was first) is to be reminded of schoolchildren in pursuit of gold stars from teacher.

But amazingly enough, it’s not entirely inapt. This election is fundamentally about whether a majority of Americans are prepared to give liberalism another chance…

It’s a thoughtful piece which has the right historical range.