Who Wouldn't Want to Share a Beer With Hillary?
Sixty-four-year-old Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was spotted downing beers and dancing in Colombia Sunday night, and people love her even more for it. Clinton, a dozen friends, and her bodyguards partied Sunday night at Cafe Havana in Cartagena at the close of the VI Summit of the Americas, the New York Post reports, and once upon a time, you could imagine these photos being viewed in a very negative light, considering the photos appeared as 11 Secret Service members are in trouble for bringing hookers to their hotel rooms in Colombia.
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But that's not the case this time. "Clinton letting her hair down is the kind of thing that would play well in that presidential run in 2016 that some of her supporters have suddenly started talking about in the last few weeks," Politico's Maggie Haberman writes. Fox Nation treats the news warmly, saying, "In photos taken at the salsa hotspot, Mrs Clinton can be seen dancing with her hands in the air and swigging back a bottle of beer while surrounded by friends." And the populist Post reports, "Clinton quickly proved she's just a regular gal when it comes to drinking -- she eschewed a glass and sucked down her Aguila pilsner cerveza straight from the bottle."
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The Post has not always been an admirer of Clinton's. Jezebel's Dodai Stewart points out the Post once called her "a buffoon, an insult to most women." That was in 1992, when Clinton was asked why she had a job even though her husband was an important person, and she responded, "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession which I entered before my husband was in public life." This was considered a terrible thing to say. Clinton was widely portrayed as a "ball-buster" -- you can still buy Clinton nutcrackers on eBay. Last week, Clinton's anti-cookie comment was back in the news after Hilary Rosen took a swipe at Ann Romney for having never "worked a day in her life." But last week nobody was talking about Clinton's terrible crime against motherhood in the '90s. They were talking about Texts From Hillary, a fawning photo meme based on an image of an all-business Clinton typing on her BlackBerry. The "ball-buster" tag has evolved into the much more enlightened B.A.M.F.
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The most negative reaction to Clinton's night out comes from Nile Gardiner at the Telegraph (not even an American paper, okay?) who asks, "Is Hillary Clinton becoming an embarrassment as Secretary of State?" The answer is no, because everyone is literally cheering her on. At the New York Post, Michael Goodwin says the Rosen gaffe might force Obama to replace Joe Biden with Clinton as his running mate. "The photos of Hillary drinking beer & dancing at Café Havana are humanizing & helpful for 2016, especially if she's challenging Romney," Politico's James Hohmann says. "That Hillary photo is good press for 2016," BuzzFeed's Zeke Miller tweets. In the two decades since Clinton's anti-cookie baking comment, the anti-cookie crowd has won.
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