They’re politicians. Wanting to win is what they do, and they’ll compromise on a lot of other things to get it. The bottom line is that if you don’t win, you don’t get very much of what you want. And the Democrats already have control of Congress, and are likely to have more control after 2009. So they have the chance to do a lot of the things they want to do if they win the Presidency.
Oh, I meant to add: whoever gets the Democratic nomination is basically guaranteed a minimum of 40 to 45 percent of the vote. To suggest that anybody who starts off with that couldn’t possibly win is absurd. It might be enough to win on its own, and anybody who runs a decent campaign can get more than that.
Seriously, the existence of Unity '08 may be having an effect, or just a part of a larger Zeitgeist. Their preferred candidates are moderates; Rudy & Hillary are both moderates. Well, Rudy’s not moderate in temperament, but he’s not a national-party-line Republican.
One likely response to a “New Yorkers” race is a nativist third party trying to grab working-class people from both majors. Has Pat Buchanan finally outgrown that idea?
The problem is that the Republicans are trying to find a candidate who’ll attract both moderate and conservative voters. The more they reach for one group the more they alienate the other.
The problem is that the Republicans are trying to find a candidate who’ll attract both moderate and conservative voters. The more they reach for one group the more they alienate the other.
Responses in this thread prompt me to wonder: who would win if President Bush were running against Senator Clinton? (Assuming the 22nd amendment didn’t apply).
Both polarizing candidates, with individual records they can’t dismiss solely as party or regional conformity, as most current candidates can do.
The answer (especially if backed with polling data) would probably shed light on the debate in the OP.
On the other hand, both Rudy and Hillary have been Middle East hawks, and Nunn sounds much more level-headed than either of them on foreign policy (see link). So who knows? If we have two New Yorkers running against each other, Nunn could present an interesting alternative.
Last month, I thought that Giuliani was the Democrat’s choice, the only candidate that Hillary could beat. Karl Rove’s tried and true strategy was to identify his opponent’s greatest strength, and smear that.
Giuliani’s pre 9/11 policy and foreign policy credentials are rather prone to attack.
But Giuliani reportedly has strong support among the evangelical rank and file, notwithstanding his positions inherited from his career in New York City.
This is a widely repeated trope, but I think it’s a non-starter. Dressing in drag for a joke is not some unforgivable cultural sin. Plenty of evangelicals do it, even preachers.
Love to see you drag those double standards out, elucidator. Far as I can tell, you’re saying Democratic dirt has a limited shelf life, but Republican dirt can last as long as surplus war rations.
You realize, of course, that for that to be true, we’d have to take all the stuff we (but not the American population generally) know about Rudy now, send it back through a time warp to the early to mid 1990s, and somehow get the national media to constantly harp on it, despite Rudy’s relative unimportance at the time.
All I can say is that I hope someone has bookmarked this thread so that in slightly more than a year they can start a pit thread and savagely mock the OP.
America is split pretty evenly between republican and democrat. The key to winning elections is not in convincing opponents to switch to your side, the key is getting the people already on your side to actually get off their asses and go to the polls. The republicans demonstrated this brilliantly in 2004 with their strategy that I like to call “harnessing hate.”
The republicans’ biggest problem in 08 is going to be getting the people who went to the polls in 04 not to vote for Bush, but to vote against teh gay, to go back to the polls in 08. And Hillary may just be that incentive. I think it’s distinctly possible that republicans who would have otherwise stayed home will show up in droves to vote against Hillary. That could spell disaster for the democrats in Congress as well. I think the dems would be wise to steer clear of her.
And anyone who says her nomination is a lock needs to look up Howard Dean’s poll numbers for October 2004.
I think Dean had good national numbers, and didn’t have a lead in Iowa. In either case, I don’t think he had a lead, in polls or fundraising, like Clinton does. I don’t think she’ll make the kind of organizational errors he did, either.