Politico’s Katie Glueck reported two feminists who’ve written opinion columns for The New York Times are still giddy about Hillary Clinton’s chances in 2016. Benghazi, schmengazi.
Appearing Thursday at the liberal Center for American Progress, former Times columnist Anna Quindlen asserted any gender-related problems Hillary encountered in previous races have been “wiped out,” and her gender would only be an asset if she runs in 2016.
Anna Quindlen supposedly retired her Newsweek column. But editor Jon Meacham brought her back to lecture the country this week. On the cover are the words "Anna Quindlen’s Advice for America: Let’s Grow Up, People!" But it is Quindlen in her piece that might seem, to borrow from Peter Jennings, to be having a two-year-old temper tantrum. There’s the denial about Scott Brown’s win:
In fact, the Senate election results in Massachusetts, in which a Republican seized the seat held by Ted Kennedy for almost half a century and threw the Democratic Party into a monumental tizzy, was a classic toss-the-bums-out event, neither specific nor illuminating.
That's a strange summary, since there was no incumbent "bum" holding the seat to toss out. (Seat-warming Paul Kirk doesn't count.) There’s the demand that liberals should really be ignoring the polls right now:
Penning the lead story for the “Yes He Can (But He Sure Hasn't Yet)” Newsweek cover, “A Liberal's Survival Guide,” Anna Quindlen defended President Obama from liberal complaints he's not enacting liberal policies fast enough as she explained that he's “saddled” by the “incremental” constitutional structure, but she fretted: “Universal health care is the area in which the gap between what's needed and what's likely is most glaring, and the limitations of the president's power most apparent.” Not hesitating to share her opinion, Quindlen despaired: It is dispiriting to watch the cheerleaders of American exceptionalism pound their chests and insist that our citizens do not need the kind of system that virtually every other developed nation finds workable....
As elected officials posture and temporize, families are bankrupted by health-care costs and forgo treatment they can't afford. Statistical measures of the national health, from life expectancy to infant mortality, continue to be substandard. And because we have that system of checks and balances, in which movement usually happens slowly and sporadically, a great need for sweeping reform may be met with a jury-rigged bill neither sufficiently deep nor broad, which perhaps someday will give way to a better one, and then eventually a truly good one.
On Wednesday's Rush Limbaugh show, the host spotted the first "Drive-By tentacle" reaching into the John-McCain's-too-old bin. In this week's Newsweek, liberal columnist Anna Quindlen takes up the case for age discrimination. "The senator's pursuit of the presidency reminds me a bit of those women who decide to have a baby in their late 50s. The impulse is understandable, the goal possible.
Anna Quindlen has advice for the Republican Party: Throw religious conservatives overboard. In her Sept. 3 Newsweek column. "Disinvited to the Party," she lauds the heartland's apparent embrace of Rudy Giuliani despite his serial marriages and "quasi-liberal positions on abortion, gay rights and gun control." To Quindlen, "quasi" means not adopting the actual platform language of the Democratic Party.