Column:

Obama for better haircuts

By Hannah Hayes

Published April 1, 2008

Hillary Clinton is ruining the election and my friend’s hair.

I’ve always admired Hill-dawg from a distance, appreciating her as a woman in the political arena.

I was “OK” with her, but Barack was my guy. I never thought that the day would come where a mere utterance of the name Clinton would send me into a blind fit of rage.

It all started March 3, when my feelings for her took a turn for the worse. I was giving my friend a hair cut in the bathroom while Wolf Blitzer fed me the latest polls and results of the primaries from the TV in the next room.

That Tuesday night, as clippings of brown hair scattered across my Obama ‘08 t-shirt, I was sure we had this.

Ohio started to worry me, then Texas, and as more and more of the percentage leaned toward Clinton, the worse and worse my friend’s hair looked.

When it was all over Hillary had Ohio and Texas and my friend made an appointment at Supercuts.

Maybe it’s because I thought this was going to end that night, or that it’s so difficult for me to understand how anyone could listen to Obama talk about the future and not say “I’ll have some of that,” but I’ve caught quite the case of Hillary fatigue.

And I don’t think I’m alone.

There have been quite a few articles running recently about calls from politicians, most notably Senators Patrick Leahy and Bob Casey, for Hillary to consider what’s at stake and/or quit the race and it’s easy for me as the girl who gives emotional diatribes about Obama during lectures to agree.

But I think that the fact this fatigue is out in the open doesn’t forebode well for what’s to come if she were to win the nomination. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone asking Obama to step down, if the positions were reversed. And it’s these notions that, I think, speak volumes about each candidate.

I agree with Hillary when she says that the more people who get a chance to vote, the better it is for democracy, but it’s difficult for me to watch her take the Democratic Party along with her in such a truly critical election.

Hillary’s campaign seems more each day like a personal vendetta than a movement for change. Ever since Hillary’s tearing-up episode, what she said then bothers me just as much as her blatant lies about her trip to Bosnia now.

“I have so many opportunities for this country,” she said. “I just don’t want to see us fall backwards. This is very personal for me.”

But it didn’t seem personal in the sense that John Edwards or Obama made the election for their candidacy. I don’t question that Hillary doesn’t want to see the country continue to plummet further into this mess that has everyone, from either side of the political spectrum, exhausted. However, I can’t help but see a woman who views being president as a personal goal for her to accomplish, like a kid who runs for student body president to put it on their college application or impress their parents. I see a person who thought this job was going to be handed to them.

I want a president who chose to run at the urgings of people like me. I’d rather have a president with little foreign experience than one who can’t seem to remember the experience at all.