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Saturday, March 08, 2008

Does anyone honestly believe these kids will come out for Hillary Clinton?
Posted by Jill | 10:46 AM


Yes, it plays a little bit cultish. But the people watching this video don't subscribe to the cynical "Any Democrat is better than a Republican" doctrine. If they ever saw the idea of a woman president as being as transformational as that of a black man, watching Hillary Clinton channel her inner Karl Rove has disavowed them of any notion that's even remotely the case.

Hillary Clinton may yet be able to wrest the Democratic nomination away from Barack Obama. But if she does, she's going to find it a pyrrhic victory indeed. Because there's nothing about her tactics this last week, from the "As far as I know..." response to whether Barack Obama is a Muslim, to likening Barack Obama's tax return challenge to Ken Starr, that is even remotely about change. The kids who fill sports arenas for Obama's rallies are not going to come out for Hillary Clinton. The press is already winding up for a return to the All Clinton Scandals -- All the Time News Network as Tweety and Brian Williams pleasure themselves under the desk while waxing rhapsodic about John McCain as some kind of warrior-poet.

Gary Hart is 100% correct:

By saying that only she and John McCain are qualified to lead the country, particularly in times of crisis, Hillary Clinton has broken that rule, severely damaged the Democratic candidate who may well be the party's nominee, and, perhaps most ominously, revealed the unlimited lengths to which she will go to achieve power. She has essentially said that the Democratic party deserves to lose unless it nominates her.

As a veteran of red telephone ads and "where's the beef" cleverness, I am keenly aware that sharp elbows get thrown by those trailing in the fourth quarter (and sometimes even earlier). "Politics ain't beanbag," is the old slogan. But that does not mean that it must also be rule-or-ruin, me-first-and-only-me, my way or the highway. That is not politics. That is raw, unrestrained ambition for power that cannot accept the will of the voters.

Senator Obama is right to say the issue is judgment not years in Washington. If Mrs. Clinton loses the nomination, her failure will be traced to the date she voted to empower George W. Bush to invade Iraq. That is not the kind of judgment, or wisdom, required by the leader answering the phone in the night. For her now to claim that Senator Obama is not qualified to answer the crisis phone is the height of irony if not chutzpah, and calls into question whether her primary loyalty is to the Democratic party and the nation or to her own ambition.


I think we already know the answer to that. What Hillary Clinton is doing is just as appalling when men do it, so this is not a slam at ambition because she's a woman. Where I disagree with Hart is his implication that loyalty to the party is necessarily a virtue, given how the Democratic Party has sold us out again and again during the last seven years, and even after gaining control of both houses of Congress. But Hillary Clinton, who seems to be running to be John McCain's running mate if she doesn't get the Democratic top spot, is not the kind of party change we need.

I hope that if Barack Obama should manage to pull out a win in Wyoming today, despite Hillary Clinton's apparently nationally successful Rovian appeals to the worst instincts of american voters, she stops to think about all the people who are going to attend Obama's rally today, and consider how few of them are going to show up for her.

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