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Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Hillary Clinton: Getting the Paxil Vote

posted by on October 23 at 15:05 PM

Eli already noted that during last night’s speech Hillary Clinton talked repeatedly about people who feel “invisible” and feel like their lives rest on a “trapdoor.”

He’s right. In my notes from last night’s speech, I underlined and circled Clinton’s use of both terms to remind myself how she punched those concepts.

“Too many Americans today feel invisible” she said, putting it in the context of economic insecurity: “They wonder if anybody sees their struggles. They are working as hard as they possibly can, yet they don’t have health insurance. The cost of college is beyond their reach. They can barely figure out how to pay for gas to commute to work.”

And later: “The economy is working fine for some Americans, but there are Americans who are working who have lost an average of $1,000 in annual income. They feel like they’re on a trapdoor,” she said, emphasizing again that Americans felt “invisible” and that they were “one paycheck away” from falling through that trapdoor.

Here’s what struck me after the speech about all this talk of feeling “invisible” and feeling like you’re standing on a “trapdoor” and you’re about to fall through.

These are ways of talking about economic insecurity (Mudede’s Marxism would call it “alienation”) that sync right up with our Paxil, Zoloft, Prozac vocabulary.

Feelings of invisibility and feeling like you’re about to fall through a trapdoor are the exact types of feelings that people describe to their doctors and shrinks, and so, I think Clinton is smart to transform traditional angry class-war rhetoric into language that resonates off people’s private personal problems: “Oh my God. She really understands me!”

I couldn’t help thinking after her speech how all her talk about feeling “invisible” sounded like a very expensive campaign research squad had found the perfect anti-depressant TV commercial language to liven up Clinton’s rap so she would make a personal connection (just like TV commercials do.)

The number of Americans on antidepressants has tripled since the last decade and 1 in 10 women in America are on antidepressants.

RSS icon Comments

1

"The number of Americans on antidepressants has tripled since the last decade..."

Maybe because the US has gotten more depressing in the last decade?

Posted by mike | October 23, 2007 3:08 PM
2

I'm on Effexor because I hated life so much that I couldn't even get out of bed. I still hate life, but thanks to Effexor, I can be the good, productive citizen that my government wants me to be.

Thank you for mind altering chemicals.

Posted by Snow White | October 23, 2007 3:12 PM
3

Interesting essay...mostly wrong on the medical science, but interesting.

Posted by Orson | October 23, 2007 3:13 PM
4

Man, those stats are depressing.

I'm going to go buy a latte.

Posted by Will in Seattle | October 23, 2007 3:13 PM
5

Interesting essay...mostly wrong on the medical science, but interesting.

Posted by Orson | October 23, 2007 3:15 PM
6

Bill Maher did a piece on Clinton and Pharma here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHXXTCc-IVg

Posted by Natalie | October 23, 2007 3:17 PM
7


I like being invisible, I can steal more that way... but I only steal from the rich.You should too.

Posted by invisible man | October 23, 2007 3:17 PM
8

wow, this is the fourth post about hillary today. yall are obsessed.

Posted by kim | October 23, 2007 3:26 PM
9

I'm voting for the Green Giant's penis in 2008.

Posted by Mr. Poe | October 23, 2007 3:33 PM
10

A Democrat framing the debate to their advantage? It's about fucking time.

Posted by Mahtli69 | October 23, 2007 3:41 PM
11

The US society has entered some new depressing era: 8 years of completely negative kleptocratic "leadership" by Cheney's gang of world-class criminals. When I got out of college years ago, the economy absolutely sucked, mortgages were at least 14%, jobs were scarce. But it was not one tenth as gloomy and alienating as it is now. Easily summarized, the middle class has almost vanished. If you are not in the upper Elite class, you are in the drive-an-hour-to-work-from-Federal-Way class. Bush's "base" is doing better than ever!

Please excuse the unintentional Marxism here, but it's getting scary out there.

My confidence that Hillary would fix much of this is quite low, but at least it would not get much worse.

Posted by Karl Marx's Cloaca | October 23, 2007 3:46 PM
12

The best anti-depressant is class war.

Posted by Eric Grandy | October 23, 2007 3:48 PM
13

I don't mind invisibilty, and I never used a 'trapdoor' analogy, but like all my mentally disturbed aquaintences, we think we have the psych lingo business figured out, and believe the therapist has never met anyone as interesting as ourselves. Still, the old adage sticks- stay on your meds.

More importantly imo, making an effort to understand and appreciate nature via science has been extremely helpful. Though the encounters in the wild sometimes make the depression even more severe, what with having to walk often through a very disturbing urban society that will likely only become moreso, I can only suggest this:

"Get on your bike, or take a hike, and meet me at our spot. Just you and me and the Halo Benders, hey that's pretty hot. And we'll sing popsongs."

Tue., October 23, 2007
7:30 PM
Seattle Town Hall
Florian Schulz Presentation at Seattle Town Hall
German-born wildlife photographer Florian Schulz discusses his experiences photographing the Yellowstone to Yukon mountain ecosystem over 10 years in this Seattle Town Hall lecture and slide show. Schulz's photos, on display at the Burke Museum in Yellowstone to Yukon: Freedom to Roam, capture not only the beauty and drama of North America's wild places, but also document the impact of human development on some of the last remaining continuous wild habitat on the continent.

I won't be voting for Hilary.

Posted by June Bee | October 23, 2007 3:58 PM
14

But it was not one tenth as gloomy and alienating as it is now.

Gloom and alienation are cool now, and they were not then, whenever then was.

Posted by JMR | October 23, 2007 4:00 PM
15

I couldn't help thinking after her speech how all her talk about feeling "invisible" sounded like a very expensive campaign research squad had found the perfect anti-depressant TV commercial language to liven up Clinton's rap so she would make a personal connection (just like TV commercials do.)

I'm sure every last syllable that comes flying out of Hillary's mouth has been studied, calculated, polled, and focus-grouped to death. Every politician does this to some extent, but the Clintons have always been right on the bleeding edge of this.

Posted by JMR | October 23, 2007 4:03 PM
16

But what does "there are Americans who are working who have lost an average of $1,000 in annual income" mean? Lost a thousand compared to when? 2000? Last year? Peak? And HOW MANY Americans? You could probably find two or three hedge fund managers who have lost "an average" of $50,000,000 just this last month, but I don't think that's Hil's audience.

It's the kind of faux-specificity designed to garner the intellectual respectability of numbers without actually having any numbers that drives me crazy.

What she means is "a lot of people are worse off than they were when Bush took office", which is true, but she has to dress it up in bogus "statistics". Which is too bad.

Posted by Fnarf | October 23, 2007 4:11 PM
17

Yeah, fnarf, when politicians use meaningless, unexplained statistics like that, it kind of drives me nuts, too.

Posted by twee | October 23, 2007 4:41 PM
18

It was a political speech, not a statistics workshop!

Posted by watcher | October 23, 2007 5:08 PM
19

@3, @5, better cut back on the dosage 'cause it looks like you're feeling more like you do now than you did when you got here.

Posted by QuimbyMcF | October 23, 2007 7:49 PM
20

Lame.

Posted by Kristin Bell | October 24, 2007 5:40 AM
21

IT'S A CONSPIRACY!

...Yeah you're dumb.

Posted by John | October 24, 2007 8:14 AM
22

My gf was one of those people on antiDs who didn't really need them. She has a depressing life and natural tendency to be a little high strung and dwell on the negative, but for many people that can be managed without mangling your brain chemistry. Her doctor never bothered telling her about the side effects and simply signed the note when she asked about antiDs. Luckily, she managed to quit without serious consequences (probably in part because she never needed them in the first place).
I'm sure a lot of people out there (on here?) do need them, but I bet most of the prescriptions these days are going to people depressed by shitty lives - not by inherent biochemical issues. Those people need therapy - not drugs.

Posted by christopher | October 24, 2007 10:31 AM
23

JMR: "I'm sure every last syllable that comes flying out of Hillary's mouth has been studied, calculated, polled, and focus-grouped to death." Yes, JMR, for the past 15 years, by pundits and "journalists" who are hell-bent on taking her down. Like Josh's little essay here, for example.
Now that Josh has "studied" Clinton, I will "study" Josh. I think Josh, always looking for an angle from which to bash Hillary, sussed out the repeated words "invisible" and "trapdoor." (Oh my God, a candidate is using words and imagery to make a point! How manipulative!) Then, like reverse engineering, he fantasized a theory by which the Clinton campaign came up with these slick, Madison Avenue-like, uh, words. Indeed, he read their minds! He just knows that during a brainstorming session, someone said, "Wait! Let's market Hillary as if she were an anti-depressant! Then, because people are idiots and we can hypnotize them, they will be magically transformed into Hillary-popping addicts! Wow, we are the best campaign strategists EVAR!"
Oh, but you can't fool Josh Feit! Noways! He may be 100% wrong, but he sure knows how take anything Hillary does and make it fit into his (and every other pundits) made-to-order narrative about Hillary.

Posted by bobbo | October 24, 2007 2:18 PM
24

Bobbo- Josh has an anti-Hillary bent? I was under the impression he's going to vote for her in the primary. He's just being "fair and balanced," for whatever that's worth. By the way, I've never heard a word fall from her lips that didn't strike me as artificial, same as John Kerry. Only advantage she has on him in the "sounding real" department is a less boring public speaking voice.
-

Posted by christopher | October 25, 2007 9:41 AM

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