Greetings from New York, where a new hate crime is taking shape: It is called "place-ism," and it will be defined in the criminal code as the belief that a particular place, be it a neighborhood, village, city, or state, is superior to any other place, and that the residents of this place have a history, customs, accent, or concerns that are different from those of other places. (Dr. Alvin Pouissant will soon recommend that place-ists be incarcerated in nuthouses; though thanks to the labors of the valorous Tipper Gore, at least our co-pay will be very low.)
An outbreak of virulent place-ism has greeted the senatorial campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, despite the conciliatory editorials of the Gannett papers and despite Mrs. Clinton's assertion that "where I'm from is not as important as what I'm for."
If Hillary does indeed run, she probably will lose, a victim of place-ism, martyr to atavistic home-philia. Recall that the only reason the carpetbagger Bobby Kennedy defeated New York Sen. Ken Keating in 1964 is that Angie Dickinson's floorboard had been killed a year earlier. Mrs. Clinton, note well.
The unwelcome wagon that has been rolled out for Hillary in the real New York is not much more hostile than what George W. Bush met when he ran for Congress in West Texas in 1978. A Yale preppie who could not even pronounce the name of his district's largest city, a necrophiliac...