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Hillary’s New Grand Strategy |
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Hillary’s new strategy of letting her husband do her dirty work shows us the kind of presidency she offers, as well as the risks her candidacy would bring in the general election.
Not only do I feel that Hillary Clinton would be an ineffective President (if she were to get elected, which I doubt, especially if she’s running against, GASP, McCain…never thought I’d say that), but I also feel she’s a dirty and lousy campaigner who could damage the Democratic party for many years to come.
On paper, I think Hillary’s new strategy vis-a-vis Bill and Obama is brilliant. Let your husband stir the storm while you campaign in other states; perhaps Senator Clinton will even win South Carolina while she appears to be conceding it. But, and this is the problem, the strategy lets us see how a Clinton Redux White House will be run.
One aspect of that is her willingness to put a member of her own party in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t†debacle. As Obama tries to deal with the Clintons, he could stay quiet and let a Former President roll all over him or he could fight back. The only problem is that he’s now running against the wrong Clinton. After the Founder of BET blasted Obama on Hillary’s stage, and every other surrogate that Hillary has blasted Obama, the question we should ask is this: If this is how she runs a campaign, what does this say about the type of President she will be? Will we transform into an Oligarchy? Two President Clintons running the show? Should we fear a family that desires this much power?
By cutting down her colleague with Bill’s help, the strategy leaves Senator Clinton vulnerable to Republican attacks in the lead up to November - and the charge that even if she does ascend to the presidency, she won’t be able to take credit for it herself.
For a long time now, my main argument in private and in writing about her at the Seminal has been that Hillary Clinton couldn’t get elected President: her nomination would force Republicans, who hate her just that much, to vote for anyone with a pulse just to keep her from the Presidency. It’s not because she’s a woman, it’s not because she’s a Senator from New York, it’s just because people simply do not like her as an individual. Simple as that: do not read much further into it. You can put a lot of dressing on a salad, but in the end it’s just a salad.
More damaging, however, would be this: If more people turn out to vote against Senator Clinton and therefore elect either a old man who wants to nuke the world, a Mormon (whose four fighting age sons are doing their duty trying to get their dad elected), or a “Christian” who thinks Dinosaurs weren’t real, you’re also giving them incentive to vote against Democrats further down the ticket.
Since 2004, we’ve made huge advances in the House of Representatives and the Senate, not to mention Governors, State Legislatures and other forms of local Government. Many of us who worked on a bunch of those new messages and found new candidates who could compete and win in Red States against incumbents with more money and more recognition would rather not see our good work undone, and believe me folks if Senator Clinton gets the nomination it will all be undone. Senator Clinton’s possible nomination threatens every advancement the Democratic Party has made since it got beat down in 2002, and the greatest threat that Senator Clinton poses is that if she does become President of the United States, blind hatred will overtake voters’ reason and possibly lead us into a decade of strict new-Republican control.
It took five years of current President Bush blowing it for America to get pissed off enough to throw everyone running for re-election who supported him out of office. Opportunities like that, for someone who works in Politics, come along once in a lifetime…and if you do it right, you only need that opportunity once. It should surprise no one that many of the newly elected Democratic Senators from the class of 2006 are publicly backing Senator Obama, citing “Fresh Ideas, Change, and he won’t hurt the Party in November.†Senator Clinton can’t campaign with new Senate candidates in red states (such as Governor Mark Warner in Virginia). Senator Obama, even Senator Edwards, could most certainly do that.
The most valuable asset a state campaign (Senate, Governor, Congressional) has is a popular Presidential candidate. A popular President candidate can raise money and awareness by making a one paragraph statement about a candidate. If someone running for Congress the first time can’t afford to be seen with a Presidential Candidate because it could hurt his/her campaign, that’s a real problem. That’s what happened with many Republican candidates in 2006, and that’s why a lot of them got beat.
To finish this off, how a candidate runs a campaign gives a fairly decent indication of how they’ll lead, since they, for the most part, are running the campaign. Look at all the cheap crap Bush pulled in 2000…look at his Presidency…a far cry from Compassionate Conservatism. But I guess that all depends on your definition of Compassion. Can we really expect that Hillary, once in office, wouldn’t lead like she campaigns?
