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Wishful Thinking

If there were such an office as that of the President Elect, the person at the left is the only one I would accept right now in the position. But there's something screwy here, and it's a language thing. Office can refer to a physical location, space, room, building, or it can refer to a position. When we say a President "takes office" we do not mean that she/he literally takes over the Oval Office (although he does, ultimately). We mean she/he performs the prescribed duties and submits to protocol in order to assume a position. They are different, related meanings of the same word: polysemes.

So here's the catch: there is no official position called Office of the President Elect. In a way, it's an oxymoron. We elect in order for the candidate to assume office in a very formal way. There is no formality to becoming President Elect. There is a sequence of events, however. First the people vote, then the Electoral College votes, then Congress certifies. But even at the end of that last act (which has not happened yet, incidentally) nobody gets sworn in as President Elect.

That leaves me to wonder what this logo means. It cannot refer to a conferred office, so it must refer to a physical location. If the sign were hanging on a door, I would not be writing at the moment. But this event did not take place in an office. So I have to wonder what these people are thinking. There is no "Office of the President Elect" as an office in this country. Obama keeps saying that there's only one president at a time. Right. So why has he invented another presidential office?

Hillary Clinton Honored at Glamour's Women of the Year Awards

Hillary Clinton: The Trailblazer

by Kati Marton

This year Hillary Clinton did something very rare for a politician: She won while losing. No, she didn’t reach the White House—but she motivated a new generation of women of every political stripe. Former GOP congresswoman Susan Molinari told Glamour, “I’m a Republican, but I’m also a mother of two girls, and now my daughters have no doubts that they could grow up to be president.”
Hillary (does anyone use her last name?) sometimes calls herself “the best-known person in the world whom you really don’t know.” As it happens, I know Hillary Clinton. Over the past decade I have spent a decent amount of time with her, partly because I interviewed her several times for a book I wrote about presidential marriages, and partly because my husband served in her husband’s cabinet. So I have seen her in the White House and the Senate, and as an honored guest at our home on close to a dozen occasions. Perhaps this middle distance—not part of Hillaryland and not a complete outsider—allows me a useful perspective on this trailblazing political pioneer.
She has always defied the odds—and her critics. As First Lady, when she was called down and out after the failure of her health care reform, she picked herself up and used her bully pulpit to become a global advocate for women and children.
Read more >>>>

Madame Secretary

She makes us look good, doesn't she?

The Bogus Roll-Call Vote in Denver

I planned not to insert a picture here for a few reasons:
1. This moment in history was an ignominious one coming, as it did, the day after the 88th anniversary of the 19th Amendment;
2. Hillary looked tense and stressed when I watched this on TV (Tivoed because the DNC scheduled it to happen while most Americans anywhere were at work, not home to watch). I did not expect her to photograph this well. But she still looked beautiful (as usual), and the picture is interesting.
The first and most important thing to understand if you are one of the young people new to this whether via Senator Obama's voter recruitment efforts or you are a Hillblazer, this is not the way roll calls nominate party candidates. Voting is done during prime time and might go past midnight if necessary until a candidate has the requisite number of votes. States allot the delegate votes according to commitments resulting from the state primaries the first time through the roll. It is not unusual, however, for states to pass or to yield to a state that has already been called and passed. After the first roll call, then delegates begin to shift votes. I have never seen a roll call like this one, and I have been watching since Adlai Stevenson was nominated. I was very young and impressionable. That is why it is important for young people to understand that this roll call vote was a scripted sham. Normally neither candidate would have been present on the floor. That Senator Clinton was expected to play the role she did (and did so well under the circumstances) was a violation, if not of the rules, of courtesy and respect for her privacy. She should not have been on the floor to see and hear voting going for or against her.
What you witnessed was history, but of the most shameful kind in a purported democracy in a party that calls itself The Democratic Party. Hillary, once again complied with the wishes (or orders) of party leadership as a means of unifying the party. She did it graciously, with resolve and strength. That she had to be there and do that at all was insulting and abusive to a candidate who ran a genuine race. The nomination process you saw was pure theater.
Now for the interesting part: The four straight-faced dudes behind her facing front, and the one looking left right behind her head are probably not delegates. From the look of them, I am thinking that they are her Secret Service detail. That makes me feel better. See, because of Bill, she continues to get Secret Service protection. It's good to see that they were there on the floor watching her back.
Another home-run by Hillary. She smiled, hit her marks, and delivered her lines like Meryl Streep. But if you believed for a minute that it was real, well there's this beautiful bridge in her state that's on the market.... Did it unify the party? What a question! They trashed our votes!

Hillary Clinton Shines at the Convention

Hillary must have been very proud of Chelsea's lovely introduction!