If she decides not to run, it would be understandable, because she herself is dirtier than her husband ever was, and the GOP has many gigabytes of evidence to prove it and would delight in breaking it out. But even if she does run, she's already screwed her candidacy bigtime, overreacting to a blip on her radar named Barack Obama:
MATT LAUER: But do you think he's qualified? I mean, he's a fellow Democrat. Would you be comfortable with him in the White House?
FUTURE PRESIDENT CLINTON: I'm going to let all of those decisions be sorted out by voters.
Huh? Obama is even more certain to be the 2008 Democrat vice-presidential nominee than Hillary's a slam dunk for the top spot. And she disses him like that? He's the greatest guy in the history of the world, and will follow two Clinton terms and be our next-next president in 2016. (Like Al Gore, sort of.) He's an asset, not a rival.
If for some reason, Sen. (pro tem) Obama doesn't get the VP nod from his party, its near-monolithic black vote may well just stay home. A black person on the ticket, as Everett Dirksen might have said, is an idea whose time has come, and Barack Obama's time has come, albeit a bit too suddenly. (That's not his fault---most presidential timber has already been felled and even provided the axe, like Newt Gingrich, for instance.)
She's not even nominated yet, and she's already made the first big mistake of her presidency. Foreign policy is hard enough, but first you have to master your own party, and certainly not eat your own. (But more on John McCain later...)
You've got it all wrong, Tommy. Hillary will be on the sidelines wondering what happened. The Obama storm is coming and she's going to be caught in it and knows it. She's not overreacting to anything.
ReplyDeleteThis is a prime example of what I like to call "The Media Narrative Construction." The media has already decided it would make a great story, and so it will become. See: Dean, Howard and McCain, John.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of Newt Gingrich as presidential material makes me want to cry.
I'd vote for Newt in a heartbeat largely because I think he is far and away the best policy thinker / politician in recent American history. My strong concerns about his character and personal morality go against him in a big way, which only underscores how positively I view his creative abilities.
ReplyDeleteAmen, HB. He's the clearest thinker out there bar none. (And JFE, you'd be surprised how "progressive" a thinker he indeed is. He quite transcends the stodginess that we conservatives are saddled with in our other putative leaders.)
ReplyDeleteBut a president must be a statesman, and Gingrich as speaker conducted himself abominably in that regard. In fact, Speaker Pelosi, for all the wretchedness she's managed to rack up so quickly in a mere matter of weeks, just doesn't have the horsepower to run herself so inextricably into the ditch as Newt did.
That took true talent. If he had half the calculativeness of a Clinton, him or her, he'd already have reserved a moving van for 1/20/09.