Don’t Count Clinton Out
Clinton’s SNL spot last night is getting tons of airtime this morning.
Xstyker comments on Clinton’s strategy moving forward. Two words: Florida and Michigan.
So, essentially, Hillary’s strategy relies on forcing the DNC to count a pair of primaries that had depressed turnout because people thought their vote wouldn’t count. I don’t see how counting those primaries can be considered more democratic than having a do-over. So if you were planning on kicking back and not volunteering in, say, Pennsylvania, think again. Hillary is tenacious, and as we’ve seen, she’ll just fight dirtier as the situation grows more desperate. If Obama is to have any hope of ending this primary before the convention (so he can take the fight to McCain), he’s going to need to keep winning big everywhere he can. Volunteer – this is the endgame. This is where Obama supporters need to work the hardest, because he’ll need a big, strong, dramatic finish in order to build momentum for the fight against McCain.
Tags: Donviti
If Hillary wins the nomination this way then we all better get use to saying President McCain.
The bitterness that will ensue will rival Florida 2000. The youth vote won’t show up. I will vote, simply because I always have and anyone is better than McCain, but what I won’t do — if Hillary becomes President — is defend or support. I’ll have no stomach for it.
She won’t take office — if that’s even possible — with a united Democratic party. It will be four more years of partisan politics. Nothing will get done. In fact, members of congress will run their reelection campaigns on thwarting Hillary.
I agree 100%
If their lust for power is so great that they (Bill and Hillary) will destroy the Democratic party to get it then I don’t know how the country can find them electable.
I agree 10000% Thanks Pandora….
I agree ten billion percent.
I agree skady-eight-trillion percent.
There’s a simple solution to the Florida and Michigan imbroglio. Let the Democratic state organizations there declare the results of those unsanctioned primaries to be void. They can use the reason/excuse that the primaries did not conform to the rules of the national party. Then schedule sanctioned primaries that meet the requirements. The rules are followed and the then elected delegates are given legitimacy.
I think Dean has signaled that he would be open to that.
Their motivation to take that course of actions ASAP would be that they would still be relevant, and the desire to be relevant is what made the state parties ignore the rules in the first place.
pandora is a moron on every website he/she writes
A ba-zillion percent agreement testifies to the contrary.
Ron, you put the ron, in mo-ron.
Couldn’t resist.
Pandora has been here for months and I/we find her to be smart, funny and insightful. You got a problem with Pandora, you got a problem with a lot of us.
Thanks guys! You’re the best!
The aspect that most interests me about the Clintons and their lust for power–which seems to have been fairly carefully hidden from their fellow Democrats (though not anybody else) for two presidential administrations and a brief senatorial career is that they are somehow seen as an aberration in Democratic politics.
The narrative myth that is being constructed around Obama suggests that he is recovering a golden age of selfless Democratic Party politics–but I’m having trouble finding exactly when that golden age occurred.
It’s quite possibly the same age that gave us Wally and the Beav that Republicans run towards. The 50’s were great, if you were a WASP in the middle class. There was no illicit sex, there was no violence there was no international turmoil…
Perhaps Obama is running towards an ideal. Clinton is running to be in control of a machine. Both are apt descriptions of the role of President, but one elicits a hopeful response and the other, mild discomfort.
It is always dangerous to put the words “selfless” and “politician” in the same sentence, no matter the party (and most pointedly when speaking of traditional libertarian party denizens).
Perhaps this is because the most traditional media coverage I see is newspapers, but I don’t see a narrative of Obama reaching for some old school Democratic ideal. There is a narrative of fashioning a new ideal — one that is certainly more inclusive and progressive than anyone has seen for some time.
It is not much of a surprise anymore to Democrats (certainly the activist portion of the party) that the Clintons are power hungry. But I am going to trot out my natural cynic and note that there aren’t many politicians in the game entirely for altruistic reasons. Nonetheless, you do want people in charge who will care that the government is reasonably well run and does what it says it will do.
The Clintons are fighting what many of us hope is the last nationwide Democratic machine battle. No one seems to have noticed that much of the old machine no longer functions at many state and municipal levels; and where it still exists, it is experiencing real setbacks (Michael Nutter in Philly).
Obama is working at crafting a broader and deeper coalition, that if he is successful, could certainly launch some of the transformational stuff that folks speculate on. But if he is successful, he won’t be perfect and he will certainly disappoint some of us some of the time.
Well put.
And when he does disappoint in some small way, or on some issue that we happen to be very keen on, Democrats (sadly) will be ruthless in their criticism.
It is just how we are built and I think it gives the conservatives a built in advantage under the old transactional model where every question is “all or nothing” and you have to go into every policy debate with your boxing gloves on.
Some Democrats will be ruthless and there may be times when ruthless criticism is warranted. But it will be the longer term Democratic project to keep communicating the long view — how whatever it is folks are disappointed in may pave the way for a better solution down the line.
The most recent example of keeping your eye on the ball would be Howard Dean’s 50-state project. Lots of folks ridiculed and denigrated him on this — Democrats and Republicans (the Clintons were setting up to launch their own shadow DNC for awhile) — but lots of defense from party activists, the state orgs AND the 2006 wins pretty much changed it all.
But the transactional model is still how work gets done, the question is how that particular transaction gets you to the longer horizon goal.
Good thread. Hillary is done. Her ruthless tactics from here on out will be like most gambles. They’ll make her appear desparate.
Obama has articulated a hopefulness that has psychologically pre-empted a painful past with which Hillary is connected. That happens sometimes. In my lifetime, it happenned in 1976, when Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford without much more than, “I’m smart, I know we can do better and I’m not one of those A**holes.”
By the way, Steve N., this is about all the “narrative myth” folks need after a period of egregious incompetence. Who’s narrative myths did YOU vote for in 2000′ and 2004?
“The most recent example of keeping your eye on the ball would be Howard Dean’s 50-state project. Lots of folks ridiculed and denigrated him on this — Democrats and Republicans (the Clintons were setting up to launch their own shadow DNC for awhile) — but lots of defense from party activists, the state orgs AND the 2006 wins pretty much changed it all.”
I agree with Cassandra that Howard Dean is a critical player in the Dem revival over the past several years. What strikes me is that process (not politics or positions) runs in strange parallel routes. In a process sense, I think the nearest equivalent to Dean for the Republicans was Gingrich in 1994. What both men insisted on as the key to victory was the nationalization of the electoral process. Gingrich used the Contract with America to nationalize Congressional elections that had previously been seen as almost exclusively (thank you, Tip O’Neil) local.
Dean has done a similar thing by creating the 50-state strategy–a national strategy, and the first one that the Dems have had in a long time. Moreover, it was a strategy waiting for a non-traditional candidate. In many ways (process again) both the failure of the 1990s Republicans to raise up a charismatic candidate and the personal success of Bill Clinton in surviving and thriving in the new political landscape kept the Gingrich Revolution contained.
With (a) the Dean strategy; (b) the decline of the Clinton machine; and (c) the rise of a new candidacy in Obama, it is evident that the Dems have a bigger chance at longterm electoral victory than the GOP ever did.
The problem with the Gingrich version was that it was all sizzle and no steak.
The contract itself was a bunch of “inside baseball” dealing with Congressional procedures – but what conservatives were all abuzz about at the time were the red meat issues like flag burning, school prayer, and abortion. (I lived in DC at the time and the absurd “through the looking glass” mentality was all pervasive.)
When republicans 1) couldn’t deliver on social issues and 2) were exposed as a bunch of corrupt frauds on budget issues (see Tom Delay) it all came apart and fast.
Any long term prospects that the Dems have will depend on leveraging Obama’s success by creating actual progress. And not by creating phony “bi-partisan” press events and the illusion of change. But by creating the kind of bi-partisanship we had in the 50’s and 60’s during the post war liberal consensus period.
It could all work out if Republicans if return to their loyal opposition posture and allow Democrats to fix all the stuff that the Republicnas have screwed up since Newt.
But by creating the kind of bi-partisanship we had in the 50’s and 60’s during the post war liberal consensus period.
I don’t think that we want to romanticize this period overly much. Issues ranging from Communism, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and the Great Society certainly caused their own partisan rifts, some of which persist today (cf, Southern Strategy). Barry Goldwater’s brand of Republicanism was one response to this. And some of those rifts were crossed by sheer force of will (Johnson) and others crossed by a call to moral authority (Have you no decency?). But at the end of the day, I think, all parties knew they had a government to run and at times that meant letting go of or compromising on ideology.
I’ve often thought that this, is the price of purity of ideology. By ratcheting up the earmarks to historic levels, I wonder if this batch of republicans knew how shallow their project was that they needed to bolster themselves with much public bringing home of the bacon. Certainly many Dems got their fair share of the pork too, but for a group of people hanging their hat on fiscal responsibility, the excessive pork just appears to me the price of trying to hang on to power.
“The narrative myth that is being constructed around Obama suggests that he is recovering a golden age of selfless Democratic Party politics–but I’m having trouble finding exactly when that golden age occurred.”
Chiefly the narrative is an echo of the Kennedy Administration. And while I like to make that comparison, I don’t believe in Golden Ages – the true Golden Age is always the one yet to come. History favors progressives. This is why my number one issue has always been environmentalism – economic crises can be weathered, wars end, social injustice can be righted. Kill the planet and you kill the future. I plan on living till at least 2050, and I have a retirement to plan for.
“History favors progressives.”
History, like evolution, favors no one. It is merely the interpretive record of the past.
Any time you hear somebody claiming the past for political purposes, you are listening to propaganda, not history.