Someone please explain to me why Hilary Clinton is leading, and gaining, in the primary polling. I simply fail to understand her desirability as a candidate.
I have lots of relatively minor reasons to dislike her:
Flag burning, her failure to admit that the Iraq vote was a mistake, her decision not to to challenge the Bumpersticker-On-Terror, her absence of a health care plan. More personally (I'm a grad student in game design) her crusade against violent videogames strikes me as dangerous.
I have relatively few reasons to support her-- it would be nice to have a woman as president, and her husband did a reasonably good job for the most part. She'll doubtless do better than any of the Republicans.
She's not a great public speaker or an inspiring, charismatic figure. She's the single human being on this Earth most capable of uniting the Republican base against her. She consistently does less well than Edwards or Obama in matchups against potential Republican candidates.
I'd chalk it up to superior fundraising and institutional support, but she barely beat Obama, and her momentum seems to be gathering rather than waning.
More largely, she seems to be almost a cipher-- where Obama's campaign focuses on "healing the partisan divide" and transforming our political culture, and where Edwards focuses on economic and social justice-- I really don't see the underlying theme or message to her campaign.
So: someone, please explain to me why I should want this woman to win the party's nomination-- or at least not dread its inevitability?