Cezary Salad

Looking to find out more about the candidates for President, I decided to check on the one information source that seems to have it all - from credit default swaps & energy futures to - apparently - bios on presidential hopefuls: Bloomberg.

Bloomberg has a standard stub of information on each of the candidates, whether Democrat or Republican, with info such as date of birth, salary, place of birth, affiliation, etc.

So nothing noteworthy here, except when you look at Sen. Hillary Clinton. Sen. Clinton’s profile contains an extra category for hobbies that I didn’t see on any of the other candidates’ pages. And it contains so many diverse, all-American hobbies that it spills over onto another line.

Among Clinton’s hobbies? “Golf, reading, dance, tennis, swimming, soccer, singing, cooking, football.”

Wow.

She must have been an extremely fit, extremely busy first lady if she actually pursued all these hobbies in earnest.

Sure, call me sceptical, but when you look at Hillary’s past performances when singing in front of crowds - as she did during her first visit to Iowa as a presidential candidate last year - you can’t help but question how some of these hobbies got up there.

At the risk of not reading too much into this, I think we all have at times listed as hobbies things that we either didn’t do too often or weren’t that good at. But in the context of a presidential race, I think this helps illuminate part of the discomfort that potential voters experience when they hear Sen. Clinton on the stump: trying to be all things to all voters, sometimes dancing delicately around difficult questions (such as her plan on Social Security, or what she thought of driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants) so as to not alienate anyone or give ammunition to her opponents. And I think its this atificial veneer that she’ll have to change, more than anything, in order to get voters to finally warm-up to her and see her as a genuine person and a genuine candidate.

Next-up: it’s the economy, stupid!