Hillary Clinton and the 'have-a-beer' Factor

I watched the Democratic presidential panel (it wasn't really a debate) Yearly Kos convention on Ustream Saturday.  While I was exhilarated by  the citizen participation and what it forebodes for American politics, I was disappointed in the performance of the two Democrat front runners. The closer Barack Obama comes to being electable, the more cautious and less candid he becomes. Worse than him, it seemed to be, was the performance of Hillary Clinton, who seems to be able to hide any possible hint of a human inside her thickening veneer.

She reminded me of something I had learned, long ago, before I was even old enough to vote, when I was a copy boy for the old Boston Herald Traveler, a newspaper that bares no resemblance to its descendant, the Herald American.

This was back in 1963.  A copy editor named Jack Cook, took me under his wing.  He was pehaps my first journalistic mentor.  He also loaned me his 1949 Volkswagen when I had big dates and the car certainly increased my cool factor over using the MBTA to take a coed home.

I was worried about Goldwater stealing the election from Lyndon Johnson and Jack explained to me the "have a beer factor."  Jack had covered politics for more than 20 years.  He was an expert on the Boston rough house style.

When it comes to the presidency, he taught me, it's not about ideology.  Neither is it about domestic or foreign policy. If it was about experience, then Nixon would easily have beaten that junior senator from Massachusetts, Jack Kennedy.

Jack's point was not about the impact of alcohol.  It was more about the conversation, the way it would have been described in the early 60s. Jack, I'm sure is long gone, but over the years, the have-a-beer concept of just sitting down and chatting with the person who would be president. There is something about the image that says, the other person is accessible and knows enough about you--even if you disagree--to somehow look at the world with a bit of your eyes in the White House vision.

People would indeed rather have a beer with Jack Kennedy than Richard Nixon. George Bush senior had his faults, but he seemed more human and accessible than did his his opponent Michael Dukakis.  There are very few nice things I have to say for the current son of Bush, but he did seem like someone easier to have a beer with than the Al Gore that ran against him or the John Kerry who followed.

Can you picture sitting down and having a beer, or even a white wine spritzer with Hillary Clinton? I cannot. On the other hand, I would love to have a beer with Bill Clinton, and in that, there may be an essential difference between the current candidate and her husband.

Comments

[Geoff Livingston]

Shel, please come to DC and write for the Washington Post. We need some more straight talk like this in our nation's number one political newspaper. Given the fake veneers, now the issue becomes which one of these folks gets caught lying in the world of social media?

[KDPaine]

As someone who has a better chance than the average voter to "have a beer" with these guys, I totally agree. Drinking with Hilary seems like too much work. Personally I actually HAVE had a glass of wine or two with Elizabeth and John Edwards and it was a thoroughly delightful experience. As for Barack, I'd like nothing better than to sit and drink beer with him in a blues club in Chicago. I think I'd learn a great deal and get a better perspective on the world. And Al Gore was in many ways similar. You'd get so lost in the ideas and policy issues you'd forget to drink that beer.