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Sunday, July 31, 2005

Nature's Ultimate Gated Community


What happened to ‘framing’? Why is the Democratic front-runner for President spending August in Nantucket, while our Republican President spends it in Crawford? Take a peek at the responses of the real people, the people who read Lucianne.com, to the announcement that Hillary and Bill will attend fundraisers and stuff on the island this month. Do liberal elites think the idiots in Iowa don’t know about Nantucket? Couldn’t they have found someplace a pinch more geographically central and a pinch less ostentatious for their party?



Ah, Nantucket, muse of limerick writers… “Over the past decade or so,” writes Geraldine Fabrikant in the New York Times , “this 50-square-mile, fishhook-shaped island off the Cape Cod coast has come to be dominated by a new class: the hyper-rich. … Once a low-key summer resort, Nantucket is rapidly turning into their private preserve…. [P]roperty values have zoomed so high that the less-well-off are being forced to leave and the island is becoming nature’s ultimate gated community. ‘It’s a castle with a moat around it,’” says one of the home owners.



A castle with a moat around it. Way to frame your values of community, democracy, and fairness.

“Here and there hedges have sprouted up, tall as windsurfers, to partition the property parcels. They separate the community, contributing to the ineffable sense that something familiar and precious about the ethos of the island is disappearing. ‘At least one new family has built a hedge to avoid people seeing them as they pass by,’ said Wade Green, 72... ‘Those open paths had an old-fashioned elegance to them. It is part of an old and fading spirit of community. Blocking them off is an unfriendly and antipublic thing to do.’”


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UPDATE: Or, Why Going to Nantucket is Really Stupid:


Jacob Weisberg in Slate:


Yet Hillary does face a genuine electability issue, one that has little to do with ideology, woman-hating, or her choice of life partner. Plainly put, it's her personality. In her four years in the Senate, Hillary has proven herself to be capable, diligent, formidable, effective, and shrewd. She can make Republican colleagues sound like star-struck teenagers. But she still lacks a key quality that a politician can't achieve through hard work: likability. As hard as she tries, Hillary has little facility for connecting with ordinary folk, for making them feel that she understands, identifies, and is at some level one of them. You may admire and respect her. But it's hard not to find Hillary a bit inhuman. Whatever she may be like in private, her public persona is calculating, clenched, relentless—and a little robotic.

With the American electorate so closely divided, it would be foolish to say that Hillary, or any other potential nominee, couldn't win. And a case can be made that the first woman who gets elected president will need to, as Hillary does, radiate more toughness than warmth. But in American elections, affection matters. Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 with candidates Main Street regarded as elitist and aloof, to a candidate voters related to personally. Hillary isn't as obnoxious as Gore or as off-putting as Kerry. But she's got the same damn problem, and it can't be fixed.