Obama’s current surge and Hillary’s corresponding descent and apparent vulnerability in the primaries seem to have provoked a lot of glee and schadenfreude among conservatives in the media. The Fox News tools are loving it, I’m seeing it on a lot of conservative blogs and hearing it on the radio. A lot of righties appear to be overjoyed that the Hillary ship is sinking like the Titanic and they keep piling on. They are talking about her “breakdown” today as if a moment of stress and emotion proves that she’s a hysterical woman who can’t do the job (either that or she’s just faking it, because she has the superhuman ability to be false and calculating every second of every day).
The bashing and the kicking doesn’t seem to stop. I can understand why conservatives are happy to see Hillary fail, but aren’t they kicking themselves in the balls by trying to help kill her candidacy so soon? Isn’t Hillary the candidate they should most want to run against? Don’t they know that Barack is going to hand them their asses in November? They could beat Hillary.
Dems and lefties have long known that HRC would have a hard time winning a general election and it’s one of the reasons that support for her candicay has been hesitant and guarded. For a time, she seemed inevitable and perhaps just barely viable enough to squeak out a close election if the unhappiness with Bush was great enough. We were ready to settle for her and hope to get a break, but nobody thought she was likely to win a landslide.
Now that Barack has broken through, I believe he’s going to be the runaway nominee. His charisma is off the charts, he actually seems to have the ability to transcend party lines, chicks dig him and there’s a feeling that he can reach voters that are simply unavailable to Hillary. This dude is like JFK, MLK and Reagan all rolled into one.
Obama is the guy that Republicans should be scared of, not Hillary, so hy are they so intent on continuing to kick the shit out of the one woman who could keep BHO out of the White House? Shouldn’t they be defending her tooth and nail? What are they, stupid or something? Are they just so programmed for the Hillary bashing that they can’t stop doing it even when it’s in their own best interests?
I’m confused. You’ve been telling us for, what, at least a year now that Hillary is the candidate they want to run against. Maybe you don’t have your ear tuned to the voice of Conservative America as well as you think you do.
I mean, come on. How do you objectively determine that “The Fox News tools are loving it”? All the journalists are excited (ie, loving it) that it’s a real horse race for both parties.
Well, Hillary is the one they SHOULD want to run against. If they don’t understand that then they’re stupid…which I guess I already knew.
I didn’t determine it objectively, but subjectively, and my impressions came from the obvious glee displayed by people like O’Reilly and Hannity and others. It’s not like they’re hiding it. If you can’t see the pleasure they’re taking in seeing Hillary go down, then I can’t “prove” it to you. It’s just my impression. They’re not nearly as critical of Obama as they are of Hillary. They seem to be getting caught up in “Obamania” despite themselves.
I’m not talking about journalists, I’m talking about conservative opinionators in the media. Both on television and online.
I think the conservatives believe Clinton is the most electable candidate the Democrats have. So they’ve been focusing their efforts on getting somebody else nominated. Part of this strategy is to claim Clinton is unelectable so that the Democrats themselves will reject her for another candidate.
But it’s a double-edged sword. By putting out the idea that Obama is more electable than Clinton, they increase the chances that Obama will be nominated. But they also are actually increasing Obama’s electability - faux electability transmutes into real electability. So the conservatives are trying to walk the narrow path of making Obama seem electable enough to get nominated but not electable enough to actually get elected.
The other double-edged aspect is that conservatives are pushing the Democrat center away from Clinton, who is arguably the most conservative Democratic candidate. Conservatives are doing this because the farther they can push the nomination to the left the greater their chances of winning the election. But the risk to them is that if the farther to the left the Democratic candidate is, the more they lose if he goes ahead and wins anyway.
Obviously, it’s a two-sided game and liberals are playing it as well. The liberal equivalents for Clinton, Obama, and Kucinich are Romney, Huckabee, and Paul.
I think Little Nemo has it. HRC is the most experienced Dem candidates, and there really isn’t anything new to be thrown at her. There’s a reason why Karl Rove made a public pronouncement that HRC was the GOP’s preferred candidate. The GOP isn’t going to announce their electoral strategy to the general public.
The calculus was that Obama would eke out a win in a tough primary season, and then the GOP smear machine would kick into gear. Not even necessarily smearing this time - just on the “no experience, also beholden to special interests” tag.
But if the Obama momentum is real and enduring, they’ve created a real problem for themselves…
Imagine this fall the Red Sox have won their Division Series and are awaiting the outcome of the Tigers-Yankees series. Let’s say at that point that the Tigers are truly the team to be feared. Do Red Sox fans root for the Yankees because they’d be an easier opponent? No, they root for the Yankees to lose just because they are the Yankees. Right wingers are rooting for Hillary to lose just because she’s Hillary. Whether or not she’d be more electable in the general election isn’t the concern, it’s just a matter of who she is.
This might explain something really odd that Glenn Greenwald caught the other day. Apparently Jonah Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds, later echoed by Michelle Malkin, are proposing the possibility of black people starting race riots if Obama loses in the general election.
Are they setting the groundwork for a post-Democratic victory narrative that the Republicans had to let Obama win to save America from such a fate? “Bring me more iced tea and vote for my candidate, MF’er!”
Conservatives sure can be crazy, scared, pathetic dumbasses sometimes.
A bunch of conservative commentary (or spin, take your pick) a few months back was grudgingly favorable to Hillary, largely because she was seen as more of a centrist (like Bill Clinton), more favorable to business and less of a headache than the alternatives. Now that the can’t miss candidate seems to be down there’s some gloating, but yes - when and if ever someone else is solidified as the frontrunner they’ll be in the cross hairs.
To the extent that any broad generalizations can be made, this analogy is smack-dab right on the money judging from the reaction of some of my conservative friends.
The repubs hate Hillary to an insane degree. It’s ridiculous. This guy I know, total neo-con cheerleader, goes on and on about all the bullshit that’s been spread about her as if it’s gospel truth. The right wing will continue to hate her regardless of what she does.
I concur. They whipped themselves up into a Two Decade Hate of Hillary about 16 years back, and it’s got a few years still to run. They drummed up a bunch of propaganda about how evil she was, and they believe every bit of their own propaganda. It’s been totally knee-jerk for ages now. They just plain hate her.
My wife’s grandmother gets a ton of fund-raising mailers for religious-right causes. It’s amazing how often they use Hillary fear to get the marks to send in their tens and twenties.
If this is what they are thinking, then they are suffering from a terminal case of petty short-sightedness and a failure to think strategically. Instead of laughing with glee over her recent setbacks, they should be soiling their drawers.
But I doubt that the media conservatives are really having an effect on the Dem primaries and caucuses, so they may be rooting for HRC’s loss but I doubt it is changing anything. If what Hentor said is true, they are already getting some anti-Obama memes out into the atmosphere in anticipation of Obama’s nomination. Interesting that they’d choose the “the blacks will riot” approach. Seems like yesterday when we were told that black people supposedly didn’t think Obama was “black enough”.
They’re gonna keep trying stuff until they find something that sticks, of course.
But I don’t think it’ll be this. You could have convinced a good chunk of white America that that would happen if Jesse Jackson were seemingly cheated out of the nomination 20 years ago. (And of course, nobody rioted when he didn’t win.) But all you have to do is take one look at Obama to call bullshit on this one.
Politics is as much about emotion as it is about intellect. Maybe more. As others have noted, a lot of conservatives just Hillary. That hate is probably clouding their judgement.
My bad-- I should have said “commentators”, not “journalists”. I watch a lot of political commentary coming from both sides, and they are all just thrilled that the Democratic primary is not a foregone conclusion with HRC. They love it because they finally have some thing comment about. I don’t think you can tell the difference between commentators loving the process, and commentators loving the particular result of the process.
I think that the media, in general, has been looking at Hillary much more closely on a day-to-day basis than they have been at Obama. It’s only natural, since she was so solidly in the lead. Similarly, Huckabee didn’t get much scrutiny until he started showing signs of life. And now McCain is surging in NH, and the focus is shifting to him.
FoxNews has plenty of faults. But this idea that everything they do is an effort to plot and scheme and influence the Democratic primary is rather simplistic.