Hillary won't win
Her voice will sink her
By Nolan Anderson
Guest Reporter
April 28, 2008
We, the voters, will never let Hillary near the presidency. And here’s why.
That voice. That shrieking, hectoring, lecturing, altogether unflattering tone she uses when she’s upset, or when she senses the upper hand and is coming in for the kill. So why should Hillary’s voice matter so much to us? Because of what it signals.
A near-majority of young men today were raised in single-parent homes in which mom is also dad. Many young men and boys today have very little experience with a male authority figure exercising reasonable and consistent authority over their lives.
A man challenging, ''Why don’t you try getting up early and running some laps? You might like it,'' or a man laying down an ultimatum like ''It’s either school or a job, you pick,'' is as unfamiliar to many young men as a foreign language.
What is familiar to us is the Hillary-tone, that stressed-out mamma ''I am not your doormat'' tone that channels, ''I’ve told you a dozen times to take out the trash.''
Men in our society have been raised to let the women in their lives do everything, then feel guilty about it, then feel hemmed in and stifled, and then complain about it.
Women who speak up about it are told, ''There you go complaining again. Can’t you do more than just complain?'' All of that is what many of us hear in her tone. Hillary’s scolding voice is a symbol of one of our greatest national failures: to raise a generation of men who will take care of business.
The movies we see today, romantic comedies written by men, are signaling to the women the terms in which we will let them remain in our lives: Do Everything For Us.
There’s the Jack Nicolson’s As Good As it Gets character, that unbearable but a supposedly charming curmudgeon who plants a kiss on Helen Hunt and says, ''You make me want to be a better man.''
Our inner Hillary Clinton responds, ''Why can’t you be a better man without such prompting? You don’t hear me implying that if you don’t pick up after me I’ll fall apart.''
Then there’s last year’s ''Knocked Up,'' in which the successful, up-and-coming - and beautiful TV anchor falls for the pothead.
How? Why?
We aren’t told. We see him step up to the plate and act responsible exactly once, and thus we are charmed.
That Hillary-voice, that hectoring tone, is the reality check. It’s what men honestly get when they act like those characters in those movies.
It’s the reminder that you can’t treat someone like a doormat for half a lifetime and expect a charm school queen as a result. Why is it, in interviews, that Hillary always seem to cut people off? Because she’s so used to hearing Bill say, ''But honey…'' at which point, Hillary jumps in ''Don’t ‘but honey’ me. You have to grow up.''
Yes, she sounds perpetually angry, ill-tempered, and what’s that word Obama used recently? Oh yeah. Bitter.





