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YOU GO, MOM! Having just learned that Senator Clinton (that's Hillary to you, bub) will join Keith Olbermann during MSNBC's coverage of tonight's state of the union address, I humbly ask readers to revisit Dana Goldstein's insightful piece on the political mommy-hacking recently exhibited by Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.These two steely politicians have of course been making maternal noises in public in an effort to soften their images and appeal to the vaunted center. Hill-- I mean, Senator Clinton apparently came away from her husband's 1992 presidential campaign with the shameful memory of her disparagement of cookie-bakers seared into her brain, and remains determined not to repeat the error, alas, long past the point where anybody cares. Meanwhile, Pelosi's crack about exerting her "mother of five" voice over her unruly charges in the House struck me as a condescending. (As one who grew up with four siblings, it also struck me with fear. I know that voice, which often accompanied the rattling of the drawer wherein resided the pancake turner/spanking implement. The somatic memory doth linger.)Before she flings herself into the arms of Jim Wallis's purportedly liberal antichoice evangelicals or once again prints up reams of her favorite cookie recipe, one would hope that the junior senator from New York, of whom I have been a fan on so many other fronts, would take a lesson from her most obvious attempt to go the mom-and-apple-pie route: her flubbing of the war vote, a flub that could cost her the party's presidential nomination.
--Adele M. Stan
