Andrew Sullivan thinks she might do well. In left-handed compliment style, he adds: "It's ... an image more suited to her actual personality than anything resembling charisma."
That reminds me of the old saying: "Let Nixon be Nixon." Which worked.
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He's right. She scores well on the school-teacher-nagging mom-shrew-bitch continium.
That wasn't meant to be critism in and of its self.
go with it.
Reading Sullivan?...You really are a liberal!
Kinda like this?
"Former White House aide George Stephanopoulos knew the couple well and wrote about Hillary in his memoirs.
"When Hillary was angry, you didn't always know it right away. One morning during the New York primary I saw her standing over him at the dining room table, finger in his face, as he shovelled cereal into his mouth, his head bent close to the bowl.""
Or this, translated into national policy terms:
"We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
Hillary has the responsibility gene?
Only if by this she means she feels compelled to make all my decisions for me, like she was my Mom.
If she's referring to war, she's making a big mistake. The men are a priority, but the over-riding priority is the objective. Lacking a clear vision thereof, she may promote a loss now, and merely defer a battle that will be fought later, only with greater bloodshed.
I don't think she understands this the least little bit.
"That reminds me of the old saying: "Let Nixon be Nixon." Which worked."
It worked for a time. Until Nixon was caught being...Well, Nixon. Not a great precedent for Hillary - it'd be nice to get back to a time when you could made it through at least one Presidency without people talking about impeachment, wouldn't it?
I wouldn't say that letting Nixon be Nixon worked. It worked in 1972, but only because McGovern let himself be McGovern. Nixon's 0.7% win in 1968 is owed to the Democratic Party being a total basket case at the time (Johnson withdrew, Kennedy got bumped off, and then Humphrey had to sit through the mess in Chicago).
Anyway, my gut feeling is that being perceived as a hardassed bastard works better for conservatives than it does for liberals.
Funny. The Nixon - Hillary comparison is probably more apt than either would admit. But as for the scolding school marm schtick working for Hillary!, uh, no. If Gore reminded too many women of their first husbands, Hillary! will remind too many men of, well, let's just say "not good things," and leave it at that.
Should she be nominated, we'll find out what the Dems' core white male-vote-Dem-no-matter-what number is.
My guess?
Less than they need to win.
Hillary is boring and her strategy is to coast.
The only way she can fail -- or so her strategists say -- is if she becomes interesting. They want her desexualized and gaffe-proof. The woman wears less mascara than Rahm Emmanuel.
Hillary has used her years in the Senate to hone being boring. The chance now of Hillary revealing her craziness is equal to that of Kerry oozing charisma. The worst Hillary will do now is pander to blacks with shrillness.
Margaret Thatcher could get away with being nanny (curiously because she was seen as putting the Nanny State to bed).
But Hillary?
School-marm disciplarian as a way to make the voters "warm" to her, or make her acceptable?
Jesus.
Cheers,
Victoria
Lots of skepticism here in the comments and elsewhere in the blogosphere over if Hillary will alienate men so much that she cannot win.
Although New York is a fairly liberal state, it is one that until recently had a Republican governor, and there are parts of New York that typically go Republican in elections. Hillary has been elected in elections that were not particularly close twice now, and she carried even the conservative leaning areas upstate.
I think people who say that she reminds men of a shrew are vastly overestimating the phenomenon.
Responsibility gene? Every politician has that - it's part of the power-lust. They want to take charge. It's the nature of the beast.
But I won't be holding my breath for any politician to step forward and say that she or he has the 'accountability gene.'
Since the GOP bench is empty, Hillary could come off as Ma kettle and still win but that isn't the point is it.
She has positioned herself well as being a non-hysterical school-marm who isn't going to take any BS from Bill or anyone and after GWB who took and continues to BS from any quarter, it may look like a refreshing change.
Remember that Bush's motto was "grownups are back in town" (lying feckless grownups nontheless) so now we are inviting the vice-principle for discipline to the reunion.
"That reminds me of the old saying: "Let Nixon be Nixon." Which worked."
It worked because of '60's exhaustion from almost a decade of riots, assassinations, war and civil disorder - topped off by the 1968 Chicago convention turmoil along with Mayor Daley's thuggish display - all while Democrats held the White House. In addition Democratic party supporters were in disarray. Eugene McCarthy challenge the party leadership and forced Johnson to step aside. Robert Kennedy then entered splitting McCarthy support as well drawing in other support, with both McCarthy and Kennedy challenging Humphrey. Humphrey who was VP during the hated Viet Nam war became the party's nominee. Both McCarthy and Kennedy supporters were passionate and with the Kennedy assassination and Humphrey nomination, I suspect many McCarthy and former Kennedy supporters sat on the sidelines.
Everything moves in cycles but I also think it is true that, on the whole, people vote against rather than for.
buffpilot -
I do think that ticket can win, but moreover, I think that for better or worse, they have the best chance of winning that any ticket that we can put together, with the materials that we presently have available to us. I mean, I reluctantly agree with HDhouse also on this - the bench is pretty thin. It's not that there aren't any candidates available, it's that there are no candidates who don't have an asterisk and a "yes, but" after their name.
I don't think there's any way to escape the reality that the last six years, in many ways, have not gone well. There have been a lot of mistakes, a lot of bad calls -- not just on Bush's part, but he has a lot to do with it, I think, by failing to restrain an increasingly corrupt Congress, and indeed, in some ways, by encouraging them; you know, it's easy to blame Frist for being the worst majority leader in recent history, but Frist's ascendancy was at Bush's instigation -- which have created a poisonous electoral environment. We've already wasted the best chance we had to visibly repudiate that legacy by retaining the House leadership team. So the bench is thin, and the momentum is slim.
If Sarah Palin does an astonishing job over the next two years and turns Alaska into the richest state in the Union practically overnight, I'm all for putting her on the ticket. Y'know, I'm open to suggestions. I can think of people I'd rather have running the country than Rudy Giulliani. None-the-less, I just don't see how else we're going to win without a ticket which not only gets out the base in a big way, but also appeals to reasonable, intelligent people who either are or like to think of themselves as being in the middle. And obviously, there are tickets you can moot which get out the base (Brownback-Hunter, for example), and there are tickets you can moot that appeal to the middle (McCain-Rice, for example), but it seems to me that we're faced with the nigh-on impossible task of recreating the Pax Reagana without the availability of an actual Ronald Reagan.
Regarding the Supreme Court and the Presidency, that is probably the single most important issue on my mind in 2008, as indeed it is in any election. I've said before, and I honestly don't think this is an exageration, that five Justices can do more harm to this country than Al Queda could ever dream of doing. Al Queda can kill individual Americans, but the Supreme Court can reach down into this country's very foundations and shake the fundamental structures that govern it. Moreover, I think that you have to assume, at this point, that the next President will appoint at least one and possibly two Justices, by sheer force of the age of the bench. A two-term President elected in 2008 will leave the bench in January 2017, by which time Our Hero and Justice Kennedy will be 80; Justice Ginsburg will be 83; Justice Stevens will be 96. It's hard to believe that all four will still be on the bench by that time.
I say what I said in the foregoing paragraph to emphasize the point, before replying to your comment about Rudy and SCOTUS nominations, that there are very few people who take the issue of Supreme Court nominations more seriously than do I. I don't think there are many people who have such exacting criteria for the kind of nominee that I want, because I don't think my views on how the Constitution should be interpreted are very popular in the country at large (they are absolutely anathema to liberals, of course, and I think that if they're honest, most conservatives are more upset about "liberal judicial activism" than "liberal judicial activism"). The point that I'm coming to here is this: I don't necessarily mind if Rudy is a RINO on social policy, because my strongest commitments, the ones that I am the most attatched to above all else, are about how, not what. I don't mind if Rudy supports gay marriage and abortion, as long as he understands how the Constitution contemplates such questions being answered, and will appoint judges and justices who share that understanding. The big lie -- and it is a lie, and everyone who advances it is a liar, and anyone who believes it is a moron -- is that one's view on abortion must define one's view of Roe-Casey. My view on the legitimacy of those cases has nothing whatsoever to do with my view on abortion, and everything to do with my view on what the Constitution of the United States says and how it should be construed by the Supreme Court of the United States. As long as Giulliani shares that understanding -- and he has given indication that he does -- then I can live with his being President. Within the narrow sphere that I believe the Federal government has a role to play in the abortion debate, I can live with him vetoing bills from a Republican Congress conditioning federal funding on refusal to provide abortions, and I can live with him signing bills from the Democrats letting it happen in the District of Columbia or the military. I won't be happy about it, but I'll live with it if he understands that these are not decisions that are removed from the democratic process by the Constitution, and will appoint judges who agree and will rule accordingly.
That's my view of it, at any rate.
"five Justices can do more harm to this country than Al Queda could ever dream of doing"
Let's tally up the score:
Al Quaeda (in the US): 2,973
Burger Court: 40 Million + Abortions
Nothing makes me laugh faster than the thought of Hitlery spying on Freepers and Malkkanites, and, well, any other Little Green Creature that has been living under her toenails the past 25 years. Pretty short-sighted to give your President Super Duper Powers, when your worst nightmare is right around the corner.
Simon-
I don't care if they have to prop Stevens up with a metal rod in his chair, or epoxy skin back on his face for the cameras like they did with Strom Thurmond. If Republicans can wheel Thurmond in for votes, with inaudible garbling only Trent Lott could understand, so can Democrats. 2 more years baby!
"Pretty short-sighted to give your President Super Duper Powers, when your worst nightmare is right around the corner."
I agree - I've been trying to tell Republicans for some time that this is both of dubious constitutionality and is normatively unwise, that being one of the reasons, but they don't listen. I really think that there's a substantial contingent in the party who just couldn't make themselves believe we were going to lose last year, and are now finally awakening to the possibility that we might lose in 2008.
I never liked Strom Thurmond myself, although I wouldn't say he's the most loathesome inhabitant of the Senate in recent years. I don't think that it's a good precedent to set, but it is the standard operating procedure for liberal justices - wasn't Justice Marshall basically entirely dysfunctional for his last year or so on the court? IIRC, that's in Edward Lazarus' book, and no conservative he.
Pretty short-sighted to give your President Super Duper Powers, when your worst nightmare is right around the corner
What I find most amusing about that statement is that it tacitly agrees with the right-wingers' belief that Hillary would abuse her power to persecute political enemies if only she had the opportunity to do so.
But realistically, what's she going to do to me? Send me to Gitmo? Please, I'm more likely to accidentally choke to death laughing at the idea of being sent to Gitmo than I am to be sent there. Is she going to wiretap me without a warrant and discover I like ordering Papa John's pizza? Gasp! Anything but that.
Maybe she will win, and maybe she will decide to go all Nixonian on us. So we'll bounce her narrow ass out of office in 2012, big deal.
"Maybe she will win, and maybe she will decide to go all Nixonian on us. So we'll bounce her narrow ass out of office in 2012, big deal."
If we approached this the way the left approached the last six years, we'll spend her entire timein office muttering dark conspiracy theories about how there won't be a 2012 election. I knew a guy a couple of years ago -- not someone I had pegged as a crazy, just an ordinary liberal guy -- who insisted, with absolute conviction, that there would never be a 2004 election, because the "neocons" had got it sewn up. Last I heard, he was insisting that Bush would not leave office in 2009, no matter who wins the election. That kind of paranoid rambling really starts to grate after a while. And he's by no means unusual - look at all the bleating about how we stole the election in 2004. It's Kevin Barrett syndrome - these people are so disconnected from reality, so hopelessly devoted to their own little weird theories that they have no idea that they're living in a fantasy land.
Spin's bad, but not if you call it "framing". If you spin your spin as "framing", you've "framed" it, so it's good now.
Honestly, now.
If Sarah Palin does an astonishing job over the next two years and turns Alaska into the richest state in the Union practically overnight, I'm all for putting her on the ticket.
Boy, your standards are high. I'd put Sarah Palin on the ticket even if she wasn't an elected politician.
What I find most amusing about that statement is that it tacitly agrees with the right-wingers' belief that Hillary would abuse her power to persecute political enemies if only she had the opportunity to do so.
I do agree she would, absolutely. This is why the unnecessary crap should have been stopped. When you give someone power, they will use every bit of it. And I think the titantic egos in the Senate were even tired of being led around by the ear, but were too afraid of reprisal of going against Bush. That said I have about as much respect for Hillary as I do for Joe Lieberman. Which isn't much.
Simon said..
If we approached this the way the left approached the last six years, we'll spend her entire timein office muttering dark conspiracy theories about how there won't be a 2012 election.
Puhleeeze. I'm sorry, the Black Helicopter People happen to reside on your side. Vince Foster. Troopergate. Chinagate. Drug Smuggling. Whitewater. This made the careers of Coulter, O'Reilly, Limbaugh, FOX News, Jonah Goldberg, Dick Morris, etc.
Now its AP in cahoots with terrorists. Lonely Kerry. Troop dissing botched jokes. Nasty Nancy. Mysterious "dead mullahs" in Iran. And please find me one liberal blog that links to Barrett. If liberals are so detached from reality, why did conservatives get the thumpin? ;)
Re: "Troopergate. Chinagate. Drug Smuggling. Whitewater."
You're mixing general craziness (i.e. "the Black Helicopter People ") with "touchy subjects we don't bring up on the left."
Clinton did in fact use troopers to get girls for him. Whitewater was a shady deal, but netted very little. Clinton and Gore cozying up to the Chinese government was in fact illegal.
So accurate, and not fake.
Moonbattery is much more a lefty phenomenon these days.
P.S. No one has to link to Barrett. He's all yours regardless.
Pogo
Troopergate and Chinagate is rightist fiction that has thouroghly been debunked, and I would be more than happy to crush you with facts. But somehow I don't think it matters to you if it was true or not.
"What I find most amusing about that statement is that it tacitly agrees with the right-wingers' belief that Hillary would abuse her power to persecute political enemies if only she had the opportunity to do so.
"
Naked Lunch wrote:
I do agree she would, absolutely.
Well you and Rush Limbaugh can get together and have a little tea party in the unlikely event that she gets elected, then.
But you all seem so convinced that Bush's wiretaps were illegal -- if they're already illegal, and the President can get away with them anyway, then what exactly would have stopped Hillary in the first place? The argument that Bush has established dangerous new powers only makes sense if you really do think that what he's doing is legal -- and since Bush's assertion is that the powers are inherent to his office, that means that Hillary would have had them too regardless of what Bush did.
Clinton did in fact use troopers to get girls for him. Whitewater was a shady deal, but netted very little.
More to the point, believing that an admitted adulterer has flunkies setting him up with women doesn't exactly defy the imagination. Neither does thinking that a man involved in business dealings with a bunch of white-collar criminals is a criminal himself. Even if Whitewater and Troopergate *were* nothing stories (and boy do I not want to have that argument for the billionth time), you still don't have to be nuts to believe in them.
But "Bush is going to cancel the 2004/2008 elections"? "Bush let the 9/11 attacks happen to enrich his oil buddies"? These are not sane things to believe. Heck, at least in the Foster case there was a genuine death of a genuine Whitewater insider to build a house of cards on.
Pogo said...
"No one has to link to Barrett. He's all yours regardless."
Is that kind of guilt by association really fair? What if the tables were turned - "no one (on the right) has to link to Jerry Falwell. He's all yours regardless." Sure, a lot of Democrats really, really hate George W. Bush, and that hatred is often astonishingly pervasive and vitriolic, but still, I had thought that the number of Democrats whose BDS has metastasized into its terminal form, 9/11 conspiracy theorizing, was nothing approaching a majority?
Heck, at least in the Foster case there was a genuine death of a genuine Whitewater insider to build a house of cards on.
Next!....on Perverted Justice!
House of cards. You're a h00t. Remember The Clinton Body Count? What's more whacked out, believing that, or 9/11 conspiracy theories?
Remember The Clinton Body Count? What's more whacked out, believing that, or 9/11 conspiracy theories?
That would would even entertain the idea that the latter is a more rational belief says a lot -- none of it good -- about your mental state.
Hm, on the one hand we have the idea that a President would have a few dozen people who threatened him killed... on the other we have the idea that the President, military, and intelligence community conspired to kill thousands of innocent civilian and military personnel for no reason.
Yeah. 'k.
Re: "Is that kind of guilt by association really fair? "
Like the supposed 'moderate Muslims', I keep waiting for the left to condemn Barrett (or 9/11 conspiracy talk), yet never see it.
On the right, Falwell has some loud detractors, but his views aren't so much sheer craziness as simply wrong. You can deabte Falwell, but the looney tunes BDS 9/11 nuts are in la la land, and are Democrats to a one.
So why doesn't someone kick him out of the party if he's so unacceptable?
(Because, crazy or not, he votes for your side, that's why.))
Pogo said...
"So why doesn't someone kick him out of the party if he's so unacceptable?"
How do you "kick him out of the party"? American political parties don't really have any mechanism for formal membership, and so lack any mechanism for the formal withholding of membership. It's one of the few ways in which the American system may compare poorly to the more organized, centralized European model of parties: you can join the Labour Party, and you can be ejected from it should a purge be required later on.
It's probably just as well. If American political parties were in the kicking people out business, I'd be first out the door. I'm much more moderate than the GOP's present center of gravity, really. ;)
I suppose that they could at least issue a statement signed by the party leadership stating that they think he's batshit insane, but that'd be highly irregular.
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