Cry, The Beloved Country

During an unremarkable stop on the presidential campaign trail last week, Hillary Clinton was thrown what appeared to be a softball: “How do you do it? How do you keep so upbeat and wonderful?” And then it happened. A catch in her voice, a gleam in her eyes—was she crying? Even as Hillary spoke—“It’s not easy, and I couldn’t do it if I didn’t passionately believe it was the right thing to do”—you could sense the media hounds waiting to pounce. John Edwards gave his two cents, and the D.C. blogosphere bubbled with accusations of alligator tears and charges that the future leader of the free world shouldn’t be so emotional. To them, Monsieur (Madame?) le President must be straight-laced and straight-faced. Anything else would be a sign of weakness.

Yet again, these wannabe pundits have it backward. If anything, what this political race needs is more emotion. With the airbrushed, carefully coiffed Edwards on one side and the spectacularly bland Obama on the other, it was a breath of fresh air to see the Iron Lady—or anybody, for that matter—do something other than flash her pearly whites for CNN.

In this era of personality politics, elections have devolved into debutante balls where composure and conformity win the day. The media’s obsession with minutiae like laughs and wardrobe choices guarantees that even the tiniest misstep will be recorded, documented, and analyzed by Wonkette et al. It’s no wonder that campaign managers have become savvy calculators of risk micro-management. All this tiptoeing around really means, however, is that at the ballot box we’ll be forced to choose between two equally shallow cardboard cutouts.

What we need is a candidate with fire and drive, somebody respectful of America’s ideals and seasoned politically, yet bold enough to suggest drastic reform if the case calls for it. We’re not going to get that kind of candidate this election. Most current contenders can be classified under the soothing moniker of “moderate”; indeed, one reason Ron Paul’s extreme views have found so much support is that he seems freer of the artifice that holds so many others in a tenacious grip.

Under the present system, a show of emotion amounts to a crack in the gleaming, vapid exterior to reveal the hopes, worries, and humanity that underlie it. It’s disconcerting because although we like to admire our candidates from afar and know the intimate details of their lives, what we really want is not a personal connection but a dependable president.

But some of the world’s best leaders, Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt included, held deep convictions of their own. They believed so passionately in their words that emotion inevitably followed. Indeed, these taboo appearances of genuine feeling have come to serve as the only indicator that a politician is anything more than a partisan mouthpiece.

Sure, Hillary has plenty of flaws, and her own public persona hasn’t escaped the scrupulous nip-and-tuck required of all presidential hopefuls. It doesn’t help that her natural temperament is only slightly warmer than a New Hampshire winter; in a college letter, she perceptively defined herself as “Hillary Rodham, acknowledged agnostic intellectual liberal, emotional conservative.”

But for a brief moment in a tacky coffee shop on the campaign trail, surrounded by 16 undecided women voters and 100 television cameras, Hillary’s glistening eyes offered a moment of revelation. Politics should be dynamic and complex, honest, and irreducible to simple stereotypes. The same thing goes for our next president.



Jessica A. Sequeira ’11, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Canaday Hall.