Rest In Peace

"I know what the conservatives think, what the liberals think, what the Democrats think, what the Republicans think. And I try to master both sides of an issue to a point where I'm totally confused as to what I think." -- Tim Russert, who died Friday afternoon at the age of 58.

A Dream Come True?*

June 6, 2008  |  by Tom Toles, Washington Post
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* The front-page slug at WashingtonPost.com

It's Still History

Everyone has been talking about this Democratic nominating contest as historic and unprecedented - to the point where us hapless TV viewers/newspaper readers don't even know what that really means anymore.

A Boston Herald columnist, Margery Eagan, helps crystallize that in her sum-up of Gloria Steinem's maybe-surprising switch in support to Barack Obama. Apparently lots of uber-Hillaryites were expecting the loyal Clinton supporter to be defiant during an appearance in Boston yesterday. (Sidenote: The degree of obstinance in some of the Hillary supporters has been kind of dumbfounding!)

Eagan says:

Yet lost in all this acrimony is that Hillary Clinton, as Obama himself said Tuesday, “has done what no woman has done before” ever, in our history. She won presidential primaries from coast to coast. She nearly won the nomination. She has answered the tough-enough question (yes, she is) for the next woman who may be today, this instant, what Obama was just a few years ago, an obscure but extremely gifted politician with a vision that resonates - because she is the right woman at the right time.

Clinton herself spoke Tuesday about “millions of Americans registering to vote for the first time, raising money for the first time, (about) mothers and fathers lifting their little girls and their little boys on to their shoulders and whispering, ‘See, you can be anything you want to be.’ ”

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have made that more true today in America than ever before. We shouldn’t lose sight of that happy fact, either.

Yes. She may have played dirty, and she may have been treated badly by Hillary Haters. But her candidacy, and Obama's, are more than just symbolic breakthroughs.