Heeellooo, Anybody Home?????

Aristotle said that there are two kinds of reasoning: the appeal to intellect and the appeal to emotions. Clearly the following two comments, both from friends of mine, both women who I respect, speak to the effects of the second appeal. Their responses to Hillary are visceral: "cannot abide" "makes my hair stand on end" I can feel the intensity of their antipathy. What I have no sense of is any rational, supported reasoning behind them.

I cannot abide Hillary. She trumpets her experience - doing WHAT? Being a wife does not mean she has political experience. One term as a senator. Big deal. Her husband wasn't so great, either - he gave us NAFTA and the WTO. I honestly believe she would do or say ANYTHING to get elected."
I think John Edwards rocks, and I love Obama because he makes me feel like John F. Kennedy is speaking.

Hillary makes my hair stand on end. I don't think she's
authentic. But then who is in Washington. I feel handled by her. I know what
you're saying about Obama but I just like feeling the country behind
someone the way they were sort of with Kennedy. 

For the first woman, Hillary engenders antipathy because she is outspoken in saying she has experience in government. Which she does. But then this writer reduces that experience in to the ultimate putdown--she was just a wife. Didn't we hear this the first time Bill ran, when the baking cookies isssue came up? And it is, at heart, purely an appeal to emotion: all she did was marry well. That's bad enough when some Rovian conservative says it, but when a woman who espouses feminist principles says it? Ugly.

The second woman doesn't like Clinton because she has been successful at playing the political game. As has been every other politician who gets in office. I suggest anyone who thinks there is an unsullied candidate waiting in the wings go rent the film The Candidate. And read Machiavelli.

Both these women like Obama because he resonates with echoes of JFK. And George Bush is president because so many people thought he'd be a great guy to have a beer with. Neither of these sentiments are the responses of an informed electorate applying reason to the candidates' records. They're functions of nostalgia, which is, after all, an emotion, one that in both cases has been deliberately engendered by Bush's and Obama's handlers.