Columnist Marsha Mercer of Media General News Service has a novel idea on how to resolve the Democratic Presidential nomination nightmare: Just make Hillary Rodham Clinton President of West Virginia and get on with life.
Might not be a bad idea. West Virginia is, after all, it’s own little area with little in common with the rest of America. Give the state its own President and be done with it.
And maybe Hillary and West Virginia deserve each other.
Writes Mercer:
Let’s declare Hillary Rodham Clinton the president of West Virginia and get on with life.
While Republican John McCain is out there portraying himself as an environmentalist who’ll also win the war in Iraq by the end of his first term, Democrats Clinton and Barack Obama are fighting over working men and women through a fog of retro racial politics. It’s weird.
Clinton won a landslide, 41-point primary victory in West Virginia. Nice work by a dead woman walking. Shouldn’t she get something from her long slog?
As she and her husband told the voters there repeatedly, West Virginia is a state that needs a president. Why not Hillary?
OK, that’s a fantasy. But what does it mean to be a state that needs a president? It doesn’t sound like something you’d want on your license plate. It sounds condescending.
The idea seems to be that certain states need presidential intervention, but it’s not as though West Virginia hasn’t had its protectors. Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., is the master of federal aid to help his home state.
Being a state that needs a president is a curious bit of Clintonspeak that emerges in pockets of poverty and despair during primary season. It goes to the dream that the president can be the solver of problems. This is a dangerous notion because it’s not true. Unfortunately, history has shown this power more observed on the campaign trail than in the White House, especially since the days of FDR and LBJ.
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