auros: If you think this is mean, imagine what the Rethuglicans will run in the general.

Auros (

auros) wrote,
@ 2007-11-02 08:29:00

Current mood:

worried

If you think this is mean, imagine what the Rethuglicans will run in the general.
This sort of thing is why I worry about Hillary as a candidate.

(Post a new comment)

	mactavish 2007-11-02 03:40 pm UTC (link)
	I think it'd be great to have a female president, just not that one. (I've never been a big supporter, and I'm not one of the people who simply didn't like her as First Lady, I really didn't pay attention to her there at all.) (Reply to this)(Thread)

kimuchi
2007-11-02 03:52 pm UTC (link)

I'm kind of with you there. There was a moment when Bill was first running when I wished it was her instead (and when I joked about it, one of the campaign workers had said "it's her turn next"...I doubt a random canvasser in Madison, WI could've known about any longer term plans, but it's amusingly prescient now), but nowadays she just strikes me as the less charismatic face of an incredibly compromised political machine.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	auros 2007-11-02 04:57 pm UTC (link)
	I'm a big fan of Kathleen Sebelius. If we had a top-level candidate with foreign policy cred (e.g. Gore, or Richardson if he were more charismatic) I'd want her for VP. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	kimuchi 2007-11-02 03:57 pm UTC (link)
	I don't know, when I listen to those clips I get the impression that, like Gore, she has a consistent but detailed position on those particular questions that just lends itself to "flipflop-y" sound bites. Or am I meant to look at the overall form of the ad rather than the specific instances? (Reply to this)(Thread)

auros
2007-11-02 05:03 pm UTC (link)

Well, the form of the ad (with easy clips taken from within a few minutes of each other in the debate) gets at something substantive. Against Gore the charges were nonsense (and their core attack against him wasn't flipflopping, it was exaggerating his accomplishments or the effect of his policies; and they didn't have actual videos of him, because most of the "boasts" they attributed to him, were things he never said).

Hillary argued for, and voted for, the authorization for the Iraq war, and she has never adequately explained that vote; her efforts to rationalize it are pathetic. "It was a vote for diplomacy," my left foot. Edwards has simply acknowledged that he was wrong; he felt pressured by the political environment, and so he accepted "intelligence" from an administration with a track record of dishonesty; he should've known better, and he won't make that mistake again. And of course, Obama spoke against the "dumb war" in '02. Meanwhile, Hillary has voted for a similar resolution against Iran. Double-you tee eff? If Cheney gets his way, and we bomb Iran some time in '08, what's she going to say? That was a vote for diplomacy, too?

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	kimuchi 2007-11-02 05:14 pm UTC (link)
	Am I remembering the wrong candidate with the "flipflop" thing? I remember it distinctly because my staunch republican dad was so offended by that. Didn't stop him from voting for his party, though. :P (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

auros
2007-11-02 05:16 pm UTC (link)

The "flipflopper" attacks were against Kerry. And while they were untrue, his style of speaking, with numerous caveats and complexities (even where they weren't needed) lent itself to the attack. It was really irritating, because the young version of John Kerry, the one who asked, "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" most emphatically did not have that problem.

(Reply to this)(Parent)

	jrtom 2007-11-02 05:18 pm UTC (link)
	I think that Kerry was the one that really got pounded on the "flip-flop" front. If he had never uttered the sentence "I voted for the war before I voted against it", he might be President right now; that was such a beautiful sound-bite for that sort of thing, and it had legs. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	evangoer 2007-11-02 04:39 pm UTC (link)
	Shrug. If Obama or Edwards wins the nomination, they will get hammered exactly like this. (Reply to this)(Thread)

	auros 2007-11-02 04:56 pm UTC (link)
	They aren't in the habit of providing as much easy ammunition. And they don't have 15 years of being tightly associated with triangulating, dodging, and parsing. (It depends on what the meaning of "is" is.) (Reply to this)(Parent)

jrtom
2007-11-02 05:05 pm UTC (link)

I don't worry about her as a candidate in terms of electability, really; the Republicans are so fragmented that I don't (currently) see any real danger of them winning the Presidency pretty much regardless of who's picked, and any of the major Republican candidates have vulnerabilities like this that can be hammered on. (I do agree that she needs to get better at delivering straight answers, though, regardless of where she's going from here.)

The problem that I have with Edwards is that I still haven't seen anything from him which communicates to me that he has much beyond a persuasive mode of speaking and a populist sensibility. I'd really like him to have more depth of experience in public service, and I'd respect him more if he'd done more with his one term as a senator.

At the moment, my dream ticket would be Gore/Richardson. Seems highly unlikely, unfortunately. *sigh*

(Reply to this)(Thread)

auros
2007-11-02 05:14 pm UTC (link)

Gore/Richardson would work for me, or Gore/Sebelius or Gore/Obama.

Edwards was the driving force behind the minimum wage intiatives which passed in seven states in '06. But I agree, I wish he'd had more experience (he should've gone for NC-Gov, rather than President, after his Senate term).

As for the fragmented Republicans -- I cannot imagine anything that would reunite and re-energize that party like having Hillary to run against.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

jrtom
2007-11-02 05:27 pm UTC (link)

Kerry certainly shot himself in the foot (as we each noted above) but I think that his choice of Edwards on the ticket was a lost opportunity for Kerry. Wesley Clark would have been a much better choice, and Edwards just came off like a likeable lightweight.

Thanks for the point about the minimum wage initiatives; I'll give Edwards some credit for that. But I still don't think he's ready to be President.

Sure, Clinton being the nominee would galvanize the Republicans somewhat. But I don't think that the Republicans can win the election by motivating people to vote _against_ her, and none of the R candidates has broad, stable support. (I think that if it comes down to Giuliani vs. Clinton that we might have the lowest turnout overall that we've ever had.)

(I don't know anything about Sebelius beyond that article you mentioned; I think that Obama could use some seasoning, too, although at least he's been in it for longer than Edwards has.)

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

auros
2007-11-02 06:06 pm UTC (link)

Clinton being the nominee would galvanize the Republicans somewhat. But I don't think that the Republicans can win the election by motivating people to vote _against_ her

I emphatically disagree with that, and I think the polling supports my interpretation unambiguously. Not to mention the right wing's glee in talking about her as if she's already won the nomination.

But, everyone's entitled to their opinion...

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	jrtom 2007-11-02 06:08 pm UTC (link)
	I acknowledge that you're more plugged into the political scene than I, and I could be wrong. shrug Let's just hope that the question doesn't arise. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tyedboyne
2007-11-02 05:29 pm UTC (link)

Hammer, meet nail. This is precisely what infuriates me about the "inevitability" of Hillary: she divides and weakens Dems, but the Rethugs will get up off their deathbeds if they have to in order to come out in droves to vote against her.

Nominating Hillary would be the best gift we could ever give them. The corporate "liberal" media will love it, no doubt, as they would get to re-hash the Clinton Wars of the last century.

Prediction: Rudy Vs. Hillary, with the media dubbing the race "The Subway Series". You read it here first.

(Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	surpheon 2007-11-02 06:20 pm UTC (link)
	"Prediction: Rudy Vs. Hillary, with the media dubbing the race "The Subway Series". You read it here first." Much like the one-click patent, I'm afraid that awful headline-to-be is too obvious for you to take credit... (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	tyedboyne 2007-11-02 07:27 pm UTC (link)
	Never have I had a prediction come true so fast! (Still waiting for that prediction about hitting lotto...) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	perspicuity 2007-11-02 09:15 pm UTC (link)
	unfortunately the link doesn't work; lj has changed something in their javascript lately, and in firefix/with noscript/adblock installed, nothing works. also because of what they're doing, there's no way to extract a link, short of going inside the html src. too lazy ;) # (Reply to this)(Thread)

	auros 2007-11-02 10:09 pm UTC (link)
	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qggO5yY7RAo On both my work PC and home Mac, the video in this page initially shows up as an icon, and when I click the icon it pops in the player just fine. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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