What got me most excited to support Hillary Clinton in her 2000 Senate race was payback for the backlash she received in Bill’s 1992 campaign. She was castigated for allegedly disrespecting homemakers with this comment,

I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life.

and then forced to quell the ensuing furor by participating in Family Circle magazine’s potential First Ladies’ bake-off. A cookie bake-off: are you kidding me? No, and sadly, the magazine’s readers have correctly predicted the results of the last four elections.

No surprise then that this year, two of the three recipes submitted so far turn out to be plagiarized. Just look at the contestants’ credentials: a former President, a multimillionaire heiress, and a self-made corporate lawyer. Does anyone really expect that they bake cookies, much less have a favorite recipe? Clearly no one was surprised that the lone man, Bill, swiped his recipe, which helps explain why Mrs. McCain is getting all the heat for her purloined cookies.

what century is this again?

Oh, and aren’t we having a national obesity epidemic? Cookie recipes?????

An open letter to Hillary Clinton:

Senator Clinton, I have admired you since 1992 when I saw you stand up to bullies who believed that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, baking cookies. When you ran for the US Senate in my home state of New York I knew your time had come, someone who will proudly represent the Empire State and show us that a wife can in every way be her husband’s equal, even his superior. And so I proudly cast my ballot for you then, and I have been so proud of your Senate career ever since.

And, as we pray for Senator Kennedy’s health, it should gives us pause to remember that the Senate is the heart of our federal democracy. And I look forward to all the work that you will continue to do for all Americans and all the world from the most important representative body in our nation. May we all one day look back and speak of our true “Lioness of the Senate.” (And remember that it’s the lioness that does the hard work in a pride!)

You have been an inspiration to us all. I am proud of what you have accomplished.

The insane proposals by John McCain and Hillary Clinton to provide a “gas tax holiday” has shaken me out of media-induced stupor: there are real issues and real values at stake in this election. Jeremiah Wright, “snipergate,” and all the rest of that is just soporific to keep us from facing hard realities. Shame on me for forgetting.

You want to talk issues and facts? Here are issues and facts: on this issue of gas pricing, Barack Obama is the only Presidential candidate who is showing real leadership on energy. McCain and Clinton can talk a good game, but standing up to the pressure to pander is the first test of political courage. Cutting the gas tax would not only be a prelude to an even more ruinous carbon policy, but it also continues to play into the false notion that federal taxes are what keep working-class people down in this country.

On the New York Times comment page in response to the paper’s editorial opposing the McCain-Clinton proposal, David Keppel, Bloomington, Indiana writes:

At a rally in Bloomington, Indiana tonight, Barack Obama talked about the importance of telling the truth — and he used the gas tax as an example. We must learn to conserve. Technological innovation — in clean energy — is important, but social innovation is even more important. That’s why the election is not just what Senator Clinton calls “a hiring decision”; it is about inspring a nation to live differently.

Bravo, Barack. Finally, I’m wide awake again to the issues that matter, not the garbage that doesn’t.

And it came to pass, when they had brought them forth abroad, that he said, Escape for thy life; look not behind thee, neither stay thou in all the plain; escape to the mountain, lest thou be consumed. ”
…
Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;
And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.

— Genesis 19:17, 24-26 (KJV)

If the Obama campaign entails a fairy tale, then my own bit of magical thinking involves the conviction that if we could only collectively suspend our disbelief for just long enough, if we can just have faith that something new can transcend what was, then we can cross the chasm that divides our nation. But like all magical thinking, there’s also a catch: to walk on thin air we must, all of us, believe it together. Open our eyes, and the magic breaks. The hopes that buoy us halfway across proves more fatal than staying exactly where we are.

Rationally, of course, I don’t quite believe this story. All politics are in the system, and all our politicians merely players. But I also believe in mankind’s occasional capacity to transcend itself and its own institutions. I’ve always considered JFK a rather bad President by the merits, and yet his overall power to inspire was clearly greater than the sum of his policies and actions.

Presented with the opportunity to move forward and leave behind our place of damnation, how many of us would nonetheless do as Lot’s wife did — whether out of fear, doubt, perhaps even mere nostalgia? How many would look back?

This Presidential campaign isn’t a battle between black and white: it is, as Obama himself observed, about the past versus the future. And the forces of the past — whether in the guise of Hillary Clinton or Jeremiah Wright — keep shouting, “Look back! Look back! You are doomed by the weight of the heavy hand of history.”

Perhaps we are. But I will keep walking this chasm, my wide-open eyes firmly forward.