Seeing Grit and Ruthlessness in Clinton’s Love of the Fight
Source: DiggFacebookMixxYahoo! BuzzPermalinkPublished: May 5, 2008 (from nytimes)

红色代表标题 橘黄色代表需要揣摩的词汇 粉红色代表讽刺意味 蓝色代表其他重要词汇 很有趣的文章剖析希拉里 看吧  

Candidate Topic PagesMore Politics News“We need a president who’s a fighter again,” Mrs. Clinton said at a rally on Thursday, adding that the next president must understand what it is like to “get knocked down and get back up: that’s the story of America, right?”

In recent days, Mrs. Clinton has chided the experts for “counting me out” and Senator Barack Obama for his inability to “close the deal” and declared that no one was going to make her quit. “She makes Rocky Balboa look like a pansy,” North Carolina’s governor, Michael F. Easley, said in endorsing her, and a union leader in Portage, Ind., praised her “testicular fortitude.”

This kind of language and pugilistic imagery, however, also evokes the baggage that makes Mrs. Clinton such a provocative political figure. For as much as a willingness to “do what it takes” and “die hard” are marketable commodities in politics, they can also yield to less flattering qualities, plenty of which have been ascribed to her over the years. Just as supporters praise her “toughness” and “tenacity,” critics also describe her as “divisive,” “a dirty fighter” or “willing to do anything to win.”

The critics include supporters of Mr. Obama who subscribe to the notion, pushed by their candidate, that Mrs. Clinton, his opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination, represents the fractious politics of the past.

The camp gained a new spokesman on Thursday when Joe Andrew, a superdelegate who was a chairman of the Democratic National Committee under President Bill Clinton, switched his support to Mr. Obama from Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Andrew accused Mrs. Clinton and her allies of being “the best practitioners of the old politics,” who “will use the exact words that Republicans used to attack me when I was defending President Clinton.”

Asked in an interview on Thursday about the Andrew defection and the dirty fighter implication, Mrs. Clinton simply shook her head and said: “I don’t know where that comes from. I think it’s just part of the mythology that’s been manufactured and promoted.”

The mythology that Mrs. Clinton speaks of was shaped during her often-embattled public career, much of it spent trying to find her footing as an
unconventional political wife.

“She has learned how to be ruthless,” said Robert B. Reich, an Obama supporter who served as Mr. Clinton’s secretary of labor and knew Mrs. Clinton in their college days. “I doubt that it came to her naturally, but she has learned.”

There is, of course, a fine line between ruthlessness and the necessary grit Mrs. Clinton’s supporters say she possesses. Her feisty talk seems to play well with people in her audiences, many of them women who are quick to hail her fighting bona fides.

“Would you want to take her on?” asked Barbara Anderson of Jeffersonville. “I’ll tell you, she has survived her fight. Obama has yet to have his.”

While Mrs. Clinton is casting herself as a warrior for ordinary Americans who need jobs, health care and cheaper gasoline, she is also establishing a contrast with her opponent, suggesting he is an untested lightweight. She mocks Mr. Obama’s rhetoric as naive and challenges him to debate her on the back of a flat-bed truck.

When asked if the fighting motif could go too far, Mrs. Clinton acknowledged that it could, but then quickly contrasted her aggressive style with Mr. Obama’s. His campaign “has been about creating an atmosphere,” she said. “I’ve never understood that. Because it’s not easy. I’ve been in a lot of these fights.”

Mrs. Clinton wears her battle scars proudly, and her surrogates promote them. In introducing her at a campaign event in Jeffersonville last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the crowd she had “endured one of the most savage beatings of anyone I’ve ever seen in my lifetime” from her political adversaries on the right.

Some of the conflicts she has engaged in were of her own choosing, like education reform in Arkansas, while others, like Whitewater and impeachment, were not. Her fighting style was honed in combat against opponents who could be relentless in their own right, both in Arkansas, where she was criticized as the young governor’s uppity wife who refused to take his name, and in Washington, where Republicans vowed to kill her efforts to overhaul health care.



From Mr. Clinton’s 1980 defeat as governor in Arkansas and the Democrats’ presidential losses through the next decade, the Clintons took away an enduring lesson: No attack can go unanswered. It must be dealt with fast, hard and decisively.


Candidate Topic PagesMore Politics NewsTo that end, Mrs. Clinton has spearheaded the creation of “war rooms” over the years, beginning with the rapid-response media operation of Mr. Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign “She was the one who named it ‘war room,’ ” said James Carville, the longtime Clinton loyalist.

Mrs. Clinton continued with a White House war room during the successful campaign to pass Mr. Clinton’s economic plan in 1993 and another for her ill-fated effort to overhaul the health care system. In that effort, the first lady went after the pharmaceutical and insurance industries as villains but also turned on a potential ally, Representative Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee, who had proposed an alternative plan. Her team solicited (ask for sth) fellow Democrats to denounce him and his proposal.

“To me it showed her brittleness, her coldness, her spoiling for a fight,” said Mr. Cooper, an Obama backer. “She’s so good at this war machine stuff, it’s sad.”

When she arrived in the Senate, Mrs. Clinton, who represents New York, urged Democratic leaders to establish a war room in the Capitol to respond to every Republican attack and to hammer home a daily message. And in her current campaign, where the war room occupies a prominent place in her headquarters in suburban Virginia, she has been a consistent advocate for hitting Mr. Obama hard.

Campaign insiders say she has usually sided with advisers favoring a more aggressive approach to challenging Mr. Obama, of Illinois, instead of those arguing for restraint, worried about reinforcing the negatives about her image.

A lawyer, Mrs. Clinton has never been a litigator. But those who know her describe her as litigator-like in her attacks: methodically gathering evidence and marshaling her arguments, habits she has displayed in Senate hearings and on the campaign trail.

While living in Arkansas, she once appeared at a news conference called by a political rival of her husband’s, pulled a sheaf of papers from her purse and began reading them aloud to counter his claims about Mr. Clinton. During the Whitewater investigation, White House aides described Mrs. Clinton pressing them to find negative information about Kenneth W. Starr, the special prosecutor, and to pass it on to reporters. In her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, she helped oversee the team that hired a private investigator to try to discredit Gennifer Flowers, who declared she had an affair with Mr. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton is said to be a more disciplined fighter than her husband. “He never stops trying to convert people,” said Max Brantley, an old friend of the Clintons from Arkansas, who writes a column for The Arkansas Times, an alternative newspaper. “She’s much more clear-eyed, recognizing the imperfectability of people.”

She is also quick to recognize when they become liabilities and is ready to cast them aside when necessary. Both friends and critics of Mrs. Clinton said she would never have engaged in the long struggle that Mr. Obama did before finally breaking with his longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. “He would not have been my pastor,” she said to reporters.

In recent years, Mrs. Clinton has more readily acknowledged her mistakes and become more willing to compromise. She has also disarmed old enemies — courting, if not entirely winning over, some of her nemeses in the news media, like Rupert Murdoch and Richard Mellon Scaife, a longtime anti-Clinton activist whose newspaper, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, endorsed her before the Pennsylvania primary.

“Part of being a political warrior is knowing when to maintain a grudge and when not to,” said Mr. Reich, the former labor secretary. “If you need somebody for a vote, if you need the media, then there’s no reason to settle scores. You do what you have to do.”

In the Senate, where her colleagues included many of her husband’s fiercest critics, she has determinedly worked with almost every Republican on legislation. “She’s a survivor,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who was an impeachment manager when he served in the House yet now has a working friendship with Mrs. Clinton. “Don’t ever count her out.”

As Mr. Obama has learned, the central principle of Mrs. Clinton’s combat style is simple endurance. Like her husband, she has always taken fierce pride in sticking around, outlasting enemies.

“We’re going to keep on going,” Mr. Clinton said to his wife in the final passage of Bob Woodward’s book “The Agenda” after the couple had pushed the White House economic plan through Congress. “They’re never going to stop us.”

That scene has obvious resonance today in Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign, and with voters.

“She’s not going to quit, not going to quit fighting,” said Jody O’Dell of Decatur, Ill., who met Mrs. Clinton last week in Jeffersonville. She got her signature, too, a prized “Hillary” across a pair of red boxing gloves.

THE BILL OF RIGHTS

March 4, 1789

(来源：专业英语学习网站 http://www.EnglishCN.com)

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a re dress of grievances.


Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particula rly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of l aw; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.


Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.
Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law. Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.



Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Amendment Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

很牛逼的项目……

哇，很不错呢！支持支持！

感谢版主，以前经常看USNews的新闻，很多看不明白，今天看了版主的指点明白了很多
在接触了很多美剧，包括老友记（10遍以上），Shark，Desperate Housewives,还有由于专业需要近2年看了百余部好莱坞电影，之后，发现美国人的一大乐趣就是调侃自我和讽刺他人，这一点是国情，在中国如果别人这么冷嘲热讽定会令人火冒三丈，而在美国就可以当作玩笑看，通过老友记就可以看出，很多笑话在这里早就动手了。。。。。。

引用:

原帖由 hys17 于 2008-5-7 09:05 发表
感谢版主，以前经常看USNews的新闻，很多看不明白，今天看了版主的指点明白了很多
在接触了很多美剧，包括老友记（10遍以上），Shark，Desperate Housewives,还有由于专业需要近2年看了百余部好莱坞电影，之后，发现 ...

有同感，外国电视台经常播放再街上捉弄人，摄像机在隐蔽处的节目，这要是再中国，早就打起来了
还有看AND1等的街球节目，这种桀骜不驯，互相挑衅的打篮球方法，在中国绝对是打群架的

说实话，还是美国再这方面宽容

哈哈.我完蛋了,再见了