Gravitas

I remember well when I first learned about Gravitas. I thought the word wonderfully evoked the majestic and somber senators of Rome staring out from their statues at the Uffizi and the British Museum. The faces of men deeply marked by ancient traditions and current worries.

The other day I watched as Hillary Clinton preached some crappy non-lessons to Gen Petraeus, and I was struck by her utter lack of gravitas. Some of it definitely boils down to sex. She's just not a man. Also, she has spent her life being second fiddle to her very ambitious husband, and its hard to shift between those kind of roles successfully. She also has no emotional core attached to the bedrock of American life like, say, Churchill did to English national life. Indeed, she doesn't seem to have emotions other than self-pity.

When she was talking to General Petraeus there was no sense of one responsible knowledgeable adult talking to another. There was instead the faint air of a nagging housewife berating her poor schmuck of a husband for getting the story all wrong and bringing up that really annoying logic and those really inconvenient facts. This was strengthened by outtakes from the previous Iraq report from Gen Petraeus on all the tv channels, where Hillary all but accuses Petraeus of lying to cover for Bush. Her phrase 'willing suspension of disbelief' is as close as a politician will go to saying 'you are lying to me'.

Her biggest problem, in my view, is that she is like an actor saying lines. Great actors make you forget that there is any acting going on. You join them in the fantasy they have spun- mission accomplished. But with Hillary, its never anything but scripted lines and ersatz emotion. We never believe what we're seeing is anything but a very poor show for the rubes. The only strength I can detect in her is the intense longing she has for the White House. There is no great wish to serve the public, or to leave the country a better place than she found it, or take her place in the pantheon of great Americans. The qualities that the Roman aristocracy lauded are nowhere in sight.

The American Republic can do better than Hillary Clinton.