SHOOTING FISH IN A BARREL. Stanley Fish evidently doesn't know anything about politics. His column yesterday was filled with bizarre assertions. First, he claims that Hillary Clinton inevitably will win the nomination because... well because he says so. No actual evidence is offered. This, of course, means that "the only remaining big question is, Who should her running mate be?"
Fish then goes on to claim, without evidence, that:
Her running mate can't be a woman. But, on the other hand, he does have to be white, or at least kind of white. The pundits keep wondering whether the country is ready for a woman president or a black president; it sure isn't ready for a woman and a black on the same ticket. Nor is it ready for a woman and a Jew, which rules out Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania.
None of this is supported with any evidence whatsoever. He then goes on to claim that "the conventional wisdom is that even if Senator Clinton wins the nomination, she couldn't win the general election" (it is? I'm apparently missing a few memos) but that this is not correct. (I'm sure Senator Clinton will be relieved.) He supports this, bizarrely, by claiming she'll win, among other states, Louisiana where "the Bush administration has a bad odor." Never mind that the state supported Bush by a large margin in 2004 and has since lost several hundred thousand Democratic voters. This, he says, "leaves us where we are always left on election day -- watching Pennsylvania and New Jersey" -- yeah, if it's 1992. (And was NJ ever a competitive state in presidential elections?)
After endorsing the choice of various dull white men from Midwestern states (Jim Doyle, Evan Bayh) he considers Bill Richardson whom he describes as "unpolished" (uninformed would be more accurate). But, not content to have on paragraph in his column actually make sense, he describes Melissa Etheridge's question to Richardson about whether being gay is a choice as "sandbagging."
The column ends with what has to be the purest example of Broderism I've ever seen outside of an actual David Broder column:
So there's the list -- Warner, Bayh, Easley, Richardson, maybe Doyle. No one who sets the pulses racing, but no one, at least on the evidence so far, who would be a total mistake. The mistake would be if Senator Clinton decided to get creative and adventurous, but on the record there seems to be little danger of that.
I mean that as a compliment. Even conservative commentators have been saying that she is running a model campaign -- disciplined, prepared, thoughtful, calm, on message. One might call it presidential, which is a good reason, among many others, to elect her president.
If conservatives say it, it must be true. You'd think the world's best newspaper could afford someone who actually understands American politics, evidently you'd be wrong.
--Sam Boyd
