Christy Hardin Smith at Firedoglake makes a truly stupid leap of logic when she takes David Broder's "I don't plan to talk about marriages" quote to mean he can't discuss the effect of a former president being married to a current president.
Smith has to be smarter than this. Indeed, within the first 10 comments, someone points out that the column wasn't about salacious details of the Clinton marriage (flying ashtrays, blue dresses, etc.), but was about the political influence Bill could wield.
To be fair, that wasn’t really a post about their marriage. It sounds to me like it was about a legitimate concern about having a former president essentially sharing the presidency. Hillary did have a big role in Bill’s White House; how proper is it that he has that influence again? It seems like a loophole in the two term limit. To be honest, I’m not sure that Hillary would be the strong front-runner without being married to Bill; maybe she’d still be competitive, but I think the main allure is that Bill Clinton would be back.
But Smith can't admit that she made a dumb connection, so she comes back with this:
but this quote stuck out for me: “No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.” Because I’ve not seen anything like that whatsoever from Broder on Guiliani, Thompson, Romney or McCain…
Why would Broder say anything about the wives of any of the other candidates? Does Smith think McCain's wife has been POTUS? Or Giuliani's? Or Romney's?
I cannot believe that Smith doesn't see the difference between the Bill and Hillary Clinton marriage and any of the other candidates' marriages. This is just more of the disingenuous bilge of the left trying to discredit anyone who even questions the wisdom of electing a former First Lady to be president.
In the comments, there were frequent references to the idea that questioning the two-for-one is a subtle form of misogyny. In other words, the only reason anyone would question this peculiar scenario is that they don't think Hillary is up to the job. I don't know anyone who has made that argument. Indeed, most conservatives think Hillary was the person who drove much of Bill's political policies from health care reform to welfare reform and beyond. In other words, it's not that people don't think Hillary is smart enough. What they are concerned about is a return to Clintonesque behavior.
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