Sometimes I feel as if the president and I are in a bad marriage.
It was never a love match, but I was willing to give the guy a shot. That is, until he started giving national forest land to the loggers and policy-writing privileges to the energy companies. Then there was the war. The lies about the war. The torture and the excuses for torture, the illegal detainees...
Pretty soon, I couldn't stand it. I wanted OUT! But after a while, I got so tired of being angry all the time that, like a beleaguered wife, I just grew resigned.
"Oh, the feds are so strapped for cash that they're going to make the folks in public housing pay more to get their toilets unclogged," I would read. "Bet that'll make a big dent in a $400 billion deficit." Shrug. "Oh, 50 people were kidnapped in one fell swoop in Iraq, now that the place is in utter chaos? That'll really burnish America's image as a nation builder." Shrug. "Guess I'll go get a Starbucks."
But even as I was giving up, one wife was going the opposite direction. She'd been kind of meek for a while, almost Stepford-ish in her eagerness to please, but finally, she'd had enough. "There are lots of things that we should be angry and outraged about," she told a crowd last week. To be angry, she declared, is "a badge of honor!"
Hillary Clinton was finally mad. And darned if the rest of the country isn't ready to be mad, too.
While the GOP has tried to taint Clinton as too angry to appeal to voters, her approval ratings actually went up after her rant. Now she's at 52 percent. Bush is at 38 percent.
The numbers tell you that it's not just Hillary who has had enough of this administration. It's a majority of Americans, tired of illegal wiretapping and lax port security. Tired of scandals that we can barely keep track of. Tired of being chided about our addiction to oil, and then learning the president's budget slashed millions from a federal alternative fuel research facility.
Americans can see that Bush's tenure has been marked by this kind of hypocrisy and incompetence, same as we witnessed during Hurricane Katrina. But until now, except in Cindy Sheehan, we haven't seen much anger.
Maybe that's because the Democrats actually believed the Republican mantra that anger is a useless, even destructive emotion.
They shouldn't have. Anger may be no substitute for action, but without it, there often isn't any action. Ask a mistreated wife. It takes anger to wake up, walk out and start a better life.
Hillary, at last, is angry. So am I. And so, it seems, is the country. Good. Because that's the first step toward change.
Skenazy is a columnist at the New York Daily News.
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