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Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. More

Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore—not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-’90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

Hillary Clinton--The Sensitive Thug

By Ta-Nehisi Coates
Feb 29 2008, 4:36 PM ET Comment

Channeling Hova here. But my point continues from the earlier one I made. Here she talks to ABC News about the difficulties of being a candidate:

"And I think women just sort of shake their head," Clinton continued. "My friends do.  They say, 'Oh, my gosh, this is so hard.' Well, it's supposed to be hard.  I'm running for the hardest job in the world.  No one has ever done this.  No woman has ever won a presidential primary before I won New Hampshire.  This is hard. And I don't expect any sympathy, I don't expect any kind of, you know, allowances or special privileges, because I knew what I was getting myself into.

"Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field," she said, "but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there."

Nothing that she says is untrue. But if I, as an Obama supporter, read that he was complaining about how difficult it is being a black candidate, it would really piss me. What I see in the statement, and in how Hillary has conducted her entire campaign, is a profound weakness, cowardice and passive-aggressiveness. She's not hard enough to directly come out and call the process skewed, so she calls it skewed and then claims that it doesn't really bother her. Whatever. Whereas a true competitor would relish getting the first question and think only of socking it out the park, Hillary complains about it, and then claims that she's still happy to have at it.

The level of deceit which drips off her answers is nauseating. Here is a candidate so hamfistedly arrogant that she once claimed in a debate that her biggest problem is that she cares too much. Give me a break. The fact of the matter is that there may not have been a worse candidate in the entire field, short of Mike Gravel. Hillary was armed with entire machinery of the Democratic Party, and yet she's going to loose. Everywhere she campaigns her poll numbers sink and her opponent's numbers rise. And her only answer to that is to simply declare that the state doesn't matter. It's OK. One way or the other this is ending, and she's going to loose. If not next Tuesday, if not in the primary, I'm convinced, in the general.



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