Hillary Clinton received a lot of attention this week for her suggestion of establishing “camps for adults” to address America’s “fun deficit.” The Washington Post reports:
What many observers say will be Hillary Rodham Clinton’s final paid speech before she begins a presidential campaign was addressed to the American Camp Association. Everyone loves summer camp, and the former secretary of state didn’t talk about anything controversial.”We have a huge fun deficit in America, and we need to figure out how to fill that fun deficit,” she said, suggesting summer camps for adults (presumably in jest) .
When I first heard about this, my immediate thought was, as is parenthetically noted above, she must be joking. She notes in this speech that “as a society we are much less racist, sexist, homophobic . . . but we sure don’t want to spend any time with anyone who we disagree with politically,” and goes on to suggest that her fun camps for adults would have “red cabins” and “blue cabins,” and that their inhabitants would have “to come together” and “actually listen to each other.”
Watch the video clip from CNN:
She may be trying to recreate the unifying–if unfulfilled–message of Obama’s 2008 victory speech in which he stated “Americans … sent a message to the world that we have never been just a collection of individuals or a collection of red states and blue states. We are, and always will be, the United States of America.” If so, adult fun camps in which campers are required to come together to discuss their political ideology somehow misses the mark.
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