Mac or PC?

People are obviously running out of things to say about Mothra vs. Godzilla, errr, Clinton vs. Obama battle for the Democratic Nomination, especially when they start comparing the two candidates to the Mac vs. PC commercials. The Mac/PC parallels have now appeared in two places: first, in the Huffington Post where Doug Kendall writes:

Obama, like the Mac, seems almost too good to be true. He’s young, hip, inspiring, and promising to do for Democrats what Ronald Reagan did for Republicans, assemble and maintain the working majority in Washington desperately needed to enact changes in foreign policy, health care and energy security.

Kendall continues the analogy, saying that Clinton is much like the old PC we have on our desk. We think of the computer as reliable, but:

As the hipster in the Mac commercial loves to point out, a PC isn’t actually all that reliable: reboot, reboot. We all experienced the rollercoaster ride that was the eight years of Bill Clinton’s presidency: we should be confident in voting for Hillary only to expect the unexpected. And PC owners just try to forget about the whole “blue screen of death,” melted hard drive thing, just like Democrats put Monica, impeachment and disbarment as far from their minds as possible as they contemplate pulling another voting lever for a presidential candidate named Clinton.

Sidebar: WTF? First of all, who still cares about the Monica thing? That’s old news, my friends. Second of all, it’s not like Hillary was the one shoving cigars up a woman’s vagina. Honestly, this is old tired territory. Some feminists say Clinton’s not enough a feminist because she stayed with Bill; others complain that she’s an over-the-top feminist because she stayed with Bill so she could make it to the White House.

The New York Times has continued the analogy, this time analyzing the candidates’ websites for the paper’s tech section. It only takes three paragraphs for Noam Cohen to declare that “The differences between hillaryclinton.com and barackobama.com can be summed up this way: Barack Obama is a Mac, and Hillary Clinton is a PC.”

Now, one would expect that the Tech section of the paper would just provide the readers with an analysis of the websites. At least, that would be the most appropriate type of article, don’t you think? Yet, like most NYT articles, the writer starts to frame a political argument:

While Apple’s ad campaign maligns the PC by using an annoying man in a plain suit as its personification, it is not clear that aligning with the trendy Mac aesthetic is good politics. The iPod may be a dominant music player, but the Mac is still a niche computer. PC, no doubt, would win the Electoral College by historic proportions (with Mac perhaps carrying Vermont).

Okay. That seems a little pro-Hillary, which would be a nice change of pace from the Obama Lovefest. But, then Cohen takes it away, ending the article with commentary from this guy:

On the big Internet issues like copyright, Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor who is supporting Mr. Obama, said there was “not a big difference on paper” between the two Democrats. Both tend to favor the users of the Internet over those who “own the pipes.” He is impressed by Mr. Obama’s proposal to “make all public government data available to everybody to use as they wish.” In the long run, however, Mr. Lessig believes that it is the ability to motivate the electorate that matters, not simple matters of style. And he’s a Mac user from way back.

The thing is: Will Obama really motivate the electorate in the long run? According to this website, Clinton actually had more popular votes (it’s close, I’ll grant you that) than Obama did on Super Tuesday. She has performed better in (most) primary states — which are a better indicator of what the electorate wants than the caucuses are — than Obama has. And then there’s the wear-down factor: People are starting to get sick of hearing about the election. I’m not sure which campaign will be damaged more by that, but David Brooks has started writing about OCS, a.k.a., Obama Comedown Syndrome. {LOL! Finally, negative press for someone besides Hillary!}

Queue the music. Enter the pipe-dream. You know, the two are so evenly matched that the Democratic party gurus should just broker a deal for a Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton ticket. Then most Democrats would be happy … except for Barack and Hillary.

BTW, Lawrence O’Donnell has an interesting column this week. At first, I thought I was going to hate it because it sounded anti-Hillary, but midway through the column my opinion changed.