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Is Hilary Next?
Topic Started: Aug 13 2006, 07:31 AM (132 Views)
Rick Zimmer
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Fulla-Carp
So, is Hilary next?

Or is this a golden opportunity for her to show she is a centrist like her husband?

Or perhaps a way for the Democrats to eliminate her as the front runner and to move to a less polarizing candidate?

Bye-bye, Joe: now Hillary’s the target
Sarah Baxter, Washington
www.timesonline.co.ok

The defeat of Joe Lieberman, the most hawkish senator in the Democratic party, by an anti-war political novice in a primary election in Connecticut last week was a spectacular coup for the “netroots”: the grassroots, anti-establishment, anti-war left that had mobilised opposition on the internet to the political grandee.
The same activists are now seeking to bend Senator Hillary Clinton to their anti-war side or face defeat in the Democratic presidential primaries. Her supporters are concerned that the “jihadist” left, galvanised by the victory of East Coast millionaire Ned Lamont, are on the rise in the Democratic party, starkly affecting its national electoral prospects.

Mike McCurry, White House press secretary during Bill Clinton’s presidency, said: “The very idea of centrism is under attack now in the party. We have our own loony left too.”

The former first lady, whose strategy for winning the presidency in 2008 has been based on persuading the electorate she is a genuine moderate and tough on national security, is watching her back warily.

“She’s got to read the results with a certain anxiety,” said McCurry, who remains close to the Clintons. “There is a very angry Democratic base out there and it’s perilous for ‘new Democrats’. She is going to be figuring out a way to heavy-up the anti-Bush message.”

Clinton faces a potentially deadly squeeze between Republicans, who are ramping up their charges that the Democrats are soft on terror in the wake of the airliner bombing plot, and her own party activists who have received all the proof they seek that untrammelled opposition to President George W Bush and the war in Iraq is an election winner.

If the New York senator is to win the Democratic nomination for president, she will need the support of her party base in the presidential primaries.

Flush with Lieberman’s defeat, Michael Moore, the left-wing film-maker, warned that the tumbrils would keep rolling. “I’m here to tell you,” Moore warned Clinton, “that you will never make it through the Democratic primaries unless you start strongly opposing the war.”

Clinton quickly shored up her position on the left last week by telephoning Lamont to congratulate him on his victory and dropping $5,000 (£2,650) into his electoral coffers.

“I am going to work for the Democratic nominee,” she said. “And I told him I would do whatever I can and whatever he wants me to do to help him in his election.”

She also declared that “there is a great deal of difference” between her position on Iraq and Lieberman’s. Days before the primary vote, in a nifty use of her influence on the Senate armed services committee, she summoned Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, and then demanded his resignation for mismanaging the war (a position Lieberman has not taken).

Clinton’s deft political manoeuvring prompted Markos Moulitsas, the dailykos.com blogger who is regarded as the left’s kingmaker, to put Clinton in his “winners” column last week. Moulitsas, however, has made no secret of his antipathy. She takes “every position, so she stands for nothing — that’s why ‘netroots’ don’t like Hillary,” he said.

The Connecticut result places Clinton in an ever more delicate spot. Lieberman, the party’s vice-presidential nominee in 2000, intends to stand as independent Democrat in the November Senate elections and Clinton has not asked him to withdraw.

“If Lieberman sticks to his guns and says, ‘Enough of this polarisation and negativity’, he might get some traction. It is an appealing message,” McCurry observed. “A number of the party hierarchy will . . . publicly embrace Lamont but privately give him a wink.”

With his knack for providing crude but effective ideological clarity, Vice-President Dick Cheney warned last week that Lieberman’s defeat would encourage “Al-Qaeda” types.

Democrats have been spluttering that Cheney abused his prior knowledge of the airliner bombing arrests, but the news from London — too late to be any use to Lieberman — has thrown the spotlight on the fault-lines in American politics over national security.
Michael Barone, the author of The Almanac of American Politics, said the votes in the Connecticut primary revealed a gulf between blue-collar Democrats and the wealthy east coast liberals who rallied to Lamont.

“In Stamford, where Joe Lieberman grew up the son of a liquor store owner, and where there are still sizable blue-collar and black communities, Mr Lieberman won with 55% of the vote,” Barone said.

“In next-door Greenwich, where Ned Lamont grew up as the scion of an investment banker family and where property prices are now among the highest in the nation, Mr Lamont won with 68% of the vote.”

The class divide has potentially far-reaching consequences because blue-collar Democrats, like the Reagan Democrats in the 1980s, tend to share the Republicans’ core values on strong national defence.

It was the loss of this group of voters at the end of the Vietnam war that led the Democratic party to lose every presidential election with the exception of the one-term Jimmy Carter from 1968 until the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war.

Clinton has a problem with blue-collar Democrats, who are inclined to look unfavourably on a woman candidate for president, whom they see as haughty. If she moves to the left to placate the “netroots”, their alienation could intensify.

McCurry is dismayed by the shift to the anti-war left. “Ironically, we were gaining ground against Bush because we could argue that we were better able to protect the nation because he was making such a hash of it.”

For now, few people in America have a good word to say about the conduct of the Iraq war, with severe consequences for the Republicans in the November elections.

There is also a powerful anti-incumbent mood that helped to sweep away Lieberman, a senator for 18 years. Combined with marked frustration with the setbacks in Iraq, it could give the Democrats victory against the Republicans in the House.

In 2008, however, the electorate will not be voting for Bush. There will be no incumbent to protest against. An Associated Press/Ipsos poll on Friday showed Bush with dismal approval ratings of 33% but the Republicans may be able to come up with a new candidate perceived as more competent.

According to Barone: “The good news for the Republicans is that they have two candidates who are widely popular because people have already seen them under stress: John McCain in a prisoner of war camp (in Vietnam) and Rudy Giuliani on September 11.”

In Connecticut, one of the most Democratic states, a poll taken by Rasmussenreports.com showed both McCain and Giuliani could beat Clinton on her ideological home territory.
[size=4]Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul -- Benedict XVI[/size]
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Larry
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Mmmmmmm, pie!
Quote:
 
Or is this a golden opportunity for her to show she is a centrist like her husband?


The instant you made that statement, you lost any shred of credibility one might have tried to give you - something you have very little of left to start with.

Hillary Clinton is a Stalinist. It's just that there is a takeover of the democrat party in the works by a group of leftists so far off the charts that they make a Stalinist look like a moderate. You are a member of that group of fanatics, so it is understandable that you would see Clinton - either Clinton - as a "centrist".

The takeover is a good thing, however. I've said this is what needs to happen for a long time. They now think they have the upper hand within the party and are making their move for control. Once they have control, rational members of the democrat rank and file will begin to leave the party in droves, and the democrat party as it is today will implode.

I love it.

Of the Pokatwat Tribe

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Rick Zimmer
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Larry
Aug 13 2006, 09:19 AM
Hillary Clinton is a Stalinist. It's just that there is a takeover of the democrat party in the works by a group of leftists so far off the charts that they make a Stalinist look like a moderate.

A perfect example of what is wrong with the political discourse in the US.
[size=4]Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul -- Benedict XVI[/size]
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Larry
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Mmmmmmm, pie!
What is wrong with political discourse in this country is when a Stalinist is described as a centrist and those who point out the ridiculousness of that are dismissed as being the reason there's a problem with political discourse in this country.

Of the Pokatwat Tribe

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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
Rick Zimmer
Aug 13 2006, 08:31 AM
So, is Hilary next?

Or is this a golden opportunity for her to show she is a centrist like her husband?

Or perhaps a way for the Democrats to eliminate her as the front runner and to move to a less polarizing candidate?

:spit: Hillary? A centrist?

EDIT: After posting I noticed Larry's response. H is no Stalinist as far as I can tell (though Vince Foster raises some parallels). However, Rick goes on to state that it might be in the Dems best interest to eliminate her from running for "a less polarizing candidate" -- so it is obvious that he really doesn't see her as a centrist either. There are few Dems to the right, and fewer there that could carry the support of the Left in the party, so I am entirely confused by what he is getting at.
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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Rick Zimmer
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ivorythumper
Aug 13 2006, 10:31 AM
Rick Zimmer
Aug 13 2006, 08:31 AM
So, is Hilary next? 

Or is this a golden opportunity for her to show she is a centrist like her husband?

Or perhaps a way for the Democrats to eliminate her as the front runner and to move to a less polarizing candidate?

:spit: Hillary? A centrist?

EDIT: After posting I noticed Larry's response. H is no Stalinist as far as I can tell (though Vince Foster raises some parallels). However, Rick goes on to state that it might be in the Dems best interest to eliminate her from running for "a less polarizing candidate" -- so it is obvious that he really doesn't see her as a centrist either. There are few Dems to the right, and fewer there that could carry the support of the Left in the party, so I am entirely confused by what he is getting at.

Actually, thumps, I do see Hilary as a centrist as I saw her husband that way.

The fact she is polarizing in today's political environment does not mean she is not a centrist.
[size=4]Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul -- Benedict XVI[/size]
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ivorythumper
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I am so adjective that I verb nouns!
OK, Rick. Usually "polarizing" when used politically implies accentuating one side of an extreme opinion to separate and even alienate it from the opposite opinion -- quite different from the more "balanced" sense that "centrist" suggests. I don't see how in the sense of a political spectrum one who is a centrist would be polarizing, but obviously you have something in mind that eludes me. (Perhaps your political geography is shifted so far left that you see her as centrist, and that your sense of the "theocons" and "neocons" constitute the entirity of the right).
The dogma lives loudly within me.
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