Vic Socotra

26 August 2008

Hillary's People

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) at the Democratic
Convention. Photo Matthew Staver/Bloomberg News

I haven’t had time to internalize how angry some people are about what happened to Hillary. I did get a taste of it, though.

It had not been a very good Monday, which is another way of saying it was awful. We are attempting to impose order on chaos, and it is a feckless task.

I won’t bore you with the details. You have a holiday weekend to prepare for, or a kid to get out the door to College. I’ll just say that we are doing the best we can to help our bureaucratic brethren, who are in a pickle. They got there by means of a memo that started the orderly shut-down of the Agency when the War Supplemental funding bill was delayed.

You can’t spend money you don’t have, after all, unless you are presidential candidate. The screw-up came when the better part of a billion bucks finally hit the comptrollers accounts from OSD.

The shut-down memo was not countermanded. Weeks were wasted and now we find ourselves at the end of the fiscal year, like Frodo and Samwise at the Crack of Doom. The dollars are shooting up like white-hot molten gysers against the dark’ning sky.

Or something. Anyhow, I have no ring of power though I do have a nice golden tooth after selfishly taking time for a long-scheduled dental appointment. Disoriented, I hustled back to Big Pink and the relative tranquility of the 4th floor to work over the fourth Proposal in three days.

The tasks are starting to blur in front of my eyes. Was this the CoCom support task, the War Augmentation or the Malign Jihadi project?

Think, Vic! Think.

I tired it, and it just made my head hurt. I completed the review only to discover that the government had released two more Requests for Proposals, plus a teaser on another big one that may happen next week.

I shotgunned the news out to the Usual Suspects, returned a couple calls and went down to the pool to see if I could clear my head. Four weeknights of swimming to go. The cell phone rang periodically as I paddled in the water. The skies were ominous, but the rain held off long enough to hear about Ludmilla’s irresolute suitor. She is a nice kid, and I hope it works out for her. Death Junior camped out at a table at the end of the pool and smoked my cigarettes while I swam and told me about the weekend with her mother.

Momma Death is in the Bureau of Prisons, in the good way, and they had a great time.

I was blurry when I finally got my butt planted in the brown chair and turned on the television to do my civic duty with the Democratic Convention.

I recall, or think I recall, a time when the networks covered the two conventions. There=2 0was a pre-season NFL game on, and Major League Baseball north of the Home Shopping Channel, and I had to journey up the channels through Telemundo to find the Democrats on Public Television.

It must have been on prime time, somewhere, but I was startled to see Jimmy Carter talking to Jim Lehrer of the Newshour. The former president was quite lucid, relaxed and upbeat. It occurred to me that I had never really understood him all these years, and that it was Teddy Kennedy who had cut him off at the knees in the run-up to the race against Ronald Reagan.

Jimmy sounded the best he has in years, or maybe it is just that I have not been listening. There was something troubling about his left eye, though. It appeared much darker than the calm seawater blue of his right. It appeared he might have been struck, or something had failed and it was possible to see the dark gears and wiring behind.

The talking heads told me the Silver Medal for presidential candidates will be awarded Tuesday night in Denver. It is highly symbolic, since it is the eighty-eight anniversary of the signing of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution. Female suffrage is not a century old in this bastion of democracy, so I guess it is understandable that some are suspicious of its failure to deliver a Presidential candidate with the Double-X chromosome.

I’m a feminist, at my most unequivocal in the global context. The subject is a lot easier to deal with as an off-shore matter. I get a little more hyper-aware as it gets closer to home.

Senator Clinton will get a showcase as a consolation prize to her fervent supporters, and her husband will be permitted to address the convention later in the week to stress what a fine Commander-in-Chief Senator Obama will be. I suspect Mr. Clinton feels the need to remind us of his legacy, which now will not be a family bookend around Mr. Bush.

Jesse Jackson Junior made a compelling speech right before Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg came to the podium for the dramatic tribute to her gasbag uncle.

That is what tore it. Teddy Kennedy may be an effective Senator- they tell me that all the time- and I suppose if you are permitted a half century of on -the-job training, you would probably develop some useful skills. I am genuinely sorry he has cancer, as I am for anyone who finds themselves in that leaky boat.

Listening to the paeans of praise to the man was too much to handle, though.

Even if you put aside the unfortunate manslaughter, he is directly \responsible for the screwed-up immigration laws implemented when he was still young and irresponsible. Yet nothing he has ever done will ever affect him personally. His wealth and privilege insulates him from our common reality, him and his two damned dogs that have the run of the United States Senate.

I tu rned off the television in disgust. Still seething, I shambling back toward dreamland. As I pulled back the covers, I realized I have a lot more in common with Hillary Clinton’s supporters than I might have thought.

Close Window