Mark Warner Speech - Harrisonburg Rally

Mark's daughters response to Congressman Rick Boucher's declaration that Mark Warner was Virginia's Greatest Governor since Thomas Jefferson was the funny lead in to this video.

Good crowd. Solid stump speech. Off to a good start.

Truly a candidate for all Virginians. He said, ".... I will work with anyone ... Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Vegetarian...to make sure everyone in Virginia gets a fair shot..."

The winds of change are blowing... another great Virginian is headed to Washington!

Jim Gilmore will a have tough time winning votes along the Valley Pike!

Mark Warner - Rally in the Valley

Mark Warner kicks off campaign in the Shenandoah Valley.
Harrisonburg, Virginia
May 6, 2008

(Speech highlights to be added later)

Seeking the Root Cause - Hillary Rodham Clinton

Hugh Rodham and Family

I heard this story first on an MSNBC late night special profile of Hillary Rodham Clinton. It led me to ponder on the "root causes" of Hillary's personality.

FISTS OF FURY - WHY HILLARY CONTINUES TO FIGHT

.. Hillary still had to deal with the usual childhood battles. At the age of four, shortly after the family moved to Park Ridge, Hillary struggled to find a niche among the neighborhood's chaotic group of preschool children. She was given an especially hard time by a young girl named Suzy O'Callaghan, who was stronger and tougher than all the girls and most of the boys. Suzy often beat up the neighborhood kids, including Hillary, who ran home crying one day to tell her mother.

If she expected sympathy, her mother delivered none. "There's no room in this house for cowards," Dorothy told her daughter. "Go back out there, and if Suzy hits you, you have my permission to hit her back. You have to stand up for yourself."

Sure enough, Hillary stomped outside and, with a circle of boys and girls watching (and Dorothy spying from behind the dining room curtain), she returned one of Suzy's punches, knocking the bully to the ground. Hillary returned triumphantly to her house, telling her mother, "I can play with the boys now! And Suzy will be my friend!" "Boys responded well to Hillary," Dorothy later said with pride. "She took charge, and they let her."

Long before she entered public life, Hillary struggled to reconcile often diametrically opposed values and viewpoints offered by her father and her mother. "I grew up between the push and tug of my parents' values, and my own political beliefs reflect both," Hillary wrote in her autobiography. "My mother was basically a Democrat, although she kept it quiet in Republican Park Ridge. My Dad was a rock-ribbed, up-by-your-bootstraps, conservative Republican and proud of it. He was also tightfisted with money."

In Living History, Hillary connected her father's staunch Republican politics with a disciplined fiscal conservatism, and the link was hardly an accident. As he had shown with his Cadillac purchase, Hugh Rodham believed firmly in the axiom "Cash is king," and he ran his business on a "strict pay-as-you-go policy." Like many who grew up during the Depression, he was driven to work hard by the fear of falling back into the quagmire of poverty. A by-product of his frugal ways was an intense dislike of wastefulness, even if the wasted amounted to no more than a few pennies. "If one of my brothers or I forgot to screw the cap back on the toothpaste tube, my father threw it out the bathroom window," Hillary recalled. "We would have to go outside, even in the snow, to search for it in the evergreen bushes in front of the house. That was his way of reminding us not to waste anything. To this day, I put uneaten olives back in the jar, wrap up the tiniest pieces of cheese and feel guilty when I throw anything away."

Hugh Rodham was "highly opinionated, to put it mildly," Hillary said. "We all accommodated his pronouncements, mostly about Communists, shady businessmen or crooked politicians, the three lowest forms of life in his eyes." Every night at the dinner table, he moderated raucous debates about politics or sports, and by the age of twelve, Hillary had learned to defend her positions on a wide array of issues, though she had also realized that it rarely made sense to directly confront her father. "I also learned," she wrote, "that a person was not necessarily bad just because you did not agree with him, and that if you believed in something, you had better be prepared to defend it."

Excerpted from Her Way by Jeff Gerth Don Van Natta Jr. Copyright © 2007 by Back Nine Books LLC.

It is predictable, that as an adult, Hillary still deals with conflict the same way she learned as a child, when confronted -- come out swinging. We are all prisoners of our childhood.

Right or Wrong, this is the Hillary Rodham Clinton of 2008. Unfortunately, she "must" win at all costs, she will throw everything including the kitchen sink, and the damage to the Democratic Party is secondary to her personal compass. She must sub-consciously assume that all will be forgiven after the primary battles over, just like the "dining room table debates" of youth. If you don't like it, lump it! She learned to give no quarter, and stand her ground. She is driven to win at all costs. One senses that Bill Clinton has just been a side-show in her life. It has always been about Hillary's ambitions, and Hugh Rodham.

And now we hear... she will "obliterate Iran" , if challenged. Reliving her childhood... still punching it out with Suzy O'Callaghan after all these years.

If he were still living, one wonders what Hugh Rodham would say about his role in defining Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008. If she wins the nomination and maybe the general election, will she finally measure up to her father's expectations?

UPDATE -- 2pm

Related Observations from David Brooks, NYT - Combat and Composure , 5/6/08

UPDATE 5/8/08
In light of the NC and IN primary results, and the hue and cry for HRC to throw in the towel, the above seems even more poignant, perhaps giving us some insight into what makes Hillary fight on. As I watched Chelsea between her two iconic parents, after the election results were sinking in on May 7th, I wondered how her life will be affected by this epic journey.