Hillary Clinton gives me the creeps some times. She doesn’t always connect with a crowd. She can have that bossy presence that can make you feel like you should be looking busier than you really are. Some people say she’s a bitch and that she sounds like she’s angling for a fight in every policy discussion.

But you know what? “Bitches get stuff done.”* The more I think of it, the more I think I like that about Hillary.

In 2000 and 2004, America listened carefully to Gore, Kerry and Bush and decided against the boring, patrician policy wonks. A slight majority of Americans fell in love with Bush’s rhetoric and grew to despise the straw men it defeated. That’s how rhetoric works, and we’ll all pay that bill on top of the mortgage for another 20 to 30 years.

One of the lasting images I have of Al Gore during the 2000 presidential election was his repetitive sighing in response to George W. Bush’s rhetorical responses to Gore’s policy proposals. ”He’s using fuzzy math,” Bush loved to say to the delight of crowds. We now know that’s Bush’s special way of describing real math, just like saying someone is doing a “heck of a job” is his special warning that someone is about to screw things up so bad that a lot of Americans will die.

Each of Al Gore’s sighs was to me a white flag of intellectual defeat to the kind of rhetoric America was desperate to hear. If Gore wouldn’t fight in a debate for what he believed, would he fight for it as President of the United States? America said, “no.” In 2004, John Kerry and John McCain’s herosim was swift boated by George Bush’s something or another. Whatever it was, about half of America that bothered to vote loved it.

But that’s all water under the bridge.

In the past few days, a different side of Hillary Clinton started flickering through the news channel above. In Thursday’s debate, Clinton continued to focus on health care differences between the candidates to the dismay of moderators and showed an emotional side when she spoke of what motivates her to fight. Yesterday, Clinton sought to publicly shame Obama for a mailer she said was “blatantly false.”

“Today in the crowd I was given two mailings that Senator Obama’s campaign is mailing out, and I have to express my deep disappointment that he is continuing to send false and discredited mailings with information that is not true to the voters of Ohio. He says one thing in speeches, and then he turns around and does this. And we have consistently called him on it. It has been discredited. It is blatantly false, yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. That is not the new politics that the speeches are about. It is not hopeful. It is destructive. Particularly for a Democrat to be discrediting universal healthcare by waging a false campaign against my plan.”
[Hillary Clinton - Obama mailing is ‘desctructive’ - 02-23-08]

* This Saturday was SNL’s first return to live TV after the writers’ strike. Comedian and writer Tina Fey pretty much sums up what seems to be a different mood in the days leading up to primaries in TX, OH and RI: ”Bitch is the new black.”