Tears of a Clown

I'm not the only one who thought Hillary's tears were calculated. Check Maureen Dowd of the NYT:

Another reporter joked: “That crying really seemed genuine. I’ll bet she spent hours thinking about it beforehand.”

The women over 45 fell for it:

Getting brushed back by Barack Obama in Iowa, her emotional moment here in a cafe and her chagrin at a debate question suggesting she was not likable served the same purpose, making her more appealing, especially to women, particularly to women over 45.

The Obama campaign calculated that they had the women’s vote over the weekend but watched it slip away in the track of her tears.

I knew Hillary was too smart to be bested by a rookie. But some of us, on the right and left, see through her:

....there was a whiff of Nixonian self-pity about her choking up. What was moving her so deeply was her recognition that the country was failing to grasp how much it needs her. In a weirdly narcissistic way, she was crying for us.

I'm sure she was thinking exactly that. "How could the country not understand how important it is for me to be President!" And maybe she got emotional for another reason as well:

She became emotional because she feared that she had reached her political midnight, when she would suddenly revert to the school girl with geeky glasses and frizzy hair, smart but not the favorite. All those years in the shadow of one Natural, only to face the prospect of being eclipsed by another Natural?

Bingo!

*Ironically, the woman who asked the question that brought the tears voted for Obama.