(from an email i got from her campaign)

Q: What do you think of the video?
>
>"I haven't seen it but I'm pleased that it seems to be taking attention
>away
>from what used to be on YouTube and getting a lot of hits, namely me
>singing
>"The Star Spangled Banner." Everybody in the world now knows I can't carry
>a
>tune. I thank heavens for small favors and the attention has shifted, so
>maybe people won't have to tune in and hear me screeching about "The Star
>Spangled Banner."
>
>Q: Should the video be removed?
>
>"You know, that's for somebody else to decide. I don't have an opinion one
>way of another. I think anything that drives interest in these campaigns
>and
>gets people who otherwise are not at all interested in politics, I think
>that's pretty good. I might quibble a little bit about the content but if
>we
>get more people, especially young people, thinking about politics, I'm
>happy
>about that."

wow! now that's is Leadership!

i wonder if the theme for her campaign will be "that's for somebody else to decide," seeing as how this was the same answer she gave when asked if she agreed with general pace that i'm "immoral" for being queer.

here's an idea, hilly- why don't you just drop the whole 'i want to be president' thing and let those who aren't afraid to actually decide things take charge? you can stay in the senate and legislate against video games, it's what you do best.

Overall I thought the response was decent: self-deprecating about the singing thing while still showing she Knew What YouTube Was About (unlike some folks in her line of work who really are completely clueless about Net culture and phenomena, or pretend to be as a selling point to the similarly technophobic amongst the populace.)

But that "it's for other people to decide" is indeed becoming a bit of a default fallback line for Da Hill. And you hit on the head the reason it's a dumb choice of default for somebody campaigning for being Decider in Chief. It's amazing how many people you hear say--about all sorts of cretins, invariably of the right wing authoritarian sort--"Well, I may not agree with every one of his positions [this remark is as best I can tell invariably made about males] but at least he stands for something/stands by his beliefs/has firm convictions" etc.

Of course this marks the speaker as a gullible fool, a craven coward, an authoritarian/submissive who is just looking for a Strong Leader to relieve them of the demands of doing their own thinking, but regrettably enough people with that mindset seem somehow never to be the targets of a campaign to deprive them of voting rights.

Let's us remember what the content of the video was; Big Sister at work, 1984; the video itself is presented as the work of a freedom insurgencym (yeah, that's exactly how I view Apple, nothing corporate about them) against an appalling Orwellian Soviet style control of the message; in that context, you really think that Hillary should have said, oh yes, take it down, or worse, tried to make the occasion a moment to educate us all on the meaning of civil liberties?

Her response was perfect on this occasion; what goes on YTube is for others to decide, and though there are a multitude of issues involved that I would like her to speak to having to do with corporate control of....well, everything these days, that wasn't the context in which to do it.

CD, I do agree that what is totally lacking in Hillary, and has been through-out her Senate terms is leadership. She seems to misunderstand the needed message - leadership is not about focusing on your own personal toughness, it's about a tough-minded engagement with the key issues created by the multiple failures of the Bush administration.

Xenophom, I can assure that in no way was this the work of David Geffen; aside from the fact that the video is not in the least a skillful or telling attack on Hillary, Geffen backed down from the quotes that Maureen Dowd went with. Guerilla attack ads aren't his shtick.

I think I'll save my own review of the actual piece, which I saw on MSNBC yesterday on Tucker's show, for a post, because I think it's an interesting example of how bad our SCLM is at reading....I was going to say something like film images, or anything even tangentially connected with any form of art, especially visual narrative, but I'll amend it to...at reading anything...

It doesn't work, folks, trust me, it doesn't

i just find her response pathetic. again, "others can decide" is no way to convince me that she should be president. that's simple enough to understand, innit?

OK. This whole election cycle is throwing off my spidey sense. The media manipulation is so over the top, the psychological tension is already to high. People are going to be American Idol neurotic by the time this is over.

As for porduction value - it's a nicer job than you might think. The channels, the layers, the masks. Clean yet grainy, Beautiful sound. The Obama Logo, the ipod, the screen messages, the juxtaposition of editing. Nope, somebody with skills. A classic psyop piece. Somebody loved it, kept it warm, fed it . . .