Salieri Rodham Clinton

There is a scene in the 1984 Academy Award winning movie Amadeus that remind me of Hillary's current predicament. The film is loosely based on the lives of Austrian composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. In the movie, the irreverant yet immensely talented Mozart humilates Salieri. At an audience with the emperor, Mozart transforms Salieri's "March of Welcome" intothe "Non più andrai" march from his opera, The Marriage of Figaro.






In sports, there are people that make what they do best look easy. In academics, we have all encountered that quick study who spends the quarter shooting hoops and hanging out and then aces the course. Most of us are plodders. We sweat through life and nothing comes especially easy. Such is also true with Hillary. It cannot be a happy time in Hillaryland with money and polls ebbing and prospects of her nomination lookign increasingly distant.

Some of where Hillary is today has to do with bad political choices, her assumption that this was her time, and that she had to position herself for the general election by pre-pandering to conservatives. But it also has to do with character in contrast to Obama's character. While she sweats through her positions paper, he invokes hope, change, and the future. While she defines herself in terms of combat and conquest, he looks for concilation and compromise. The paradox is that Clinton if she is nominated would in many respects be an echo of McCain, ideologically siblings. By contrast, the temperamentally moderate Obama has staked out a far more contrasting position ideologically, while framing his approach in terms of national solidarity.

Hillary, the Salieri of American politics, may well have the resume and the policies, but she cannot compete against the effortless grace and vision of Obama, the Mozart of American politics.