Most people vote for stupid and superficial reasons. To not vote for someone because you are afraid some brainless housewife is going to vote for him on Oprah’s command is just as shallow and brainless as the housewife’s reasoning.
Do two related people of the same generation really count as a “dynasty”? Not really how I think of the word anyways. The Bushs and the Kennedys had multiple generations with multiple members of each becoming successful politicians, but the so far as I know the Clintons are the only members of their families to hold national political offices, and I don’t think Chelsea has shown any interest.
Also Hillary was pursuing a political career when she married Bill. My folks are both doctors who met in med school. No other member of their family are doctors. It hardly seems right to say I’m from a “dynasty” of doctors.
I can see where you are coming from. Still, this only appears to be a valid complaint if you are talking about the effectiveness of this particularly campaign stategy, but not if you are talking about his fitness as a candidate. Campaigning is about generating votes, and since he’ll probably get more votes with Oprah’s help than without, I don’t think he’s made a mistake by accepting her endorsement. If 50 Cent wanted to help Hillary by giving her his seal of approval, I’m sure she’d gladly let him…but only if it helped her chances. Everyone knows that 50 Cent’s presence would do more harm than good (I don’t know about Streisand’s effect though).
Newt hasn’t been in political office since she’s been in the Senate. That’s an important detail, since my main concern is that Republicans, in trying to keep their jobs, will try to block everything Hillary does.
Can you point to anything specific and politically significant that she has accomplished that required bipartisan support? I would really like to think I’m overestimating the hatred of her opponents, but I don’t think I am.
Frankly, the GOP doesn’t need to dig up any more dirt on Hillary because they have enough ill will there to last a lifetime. Whatever scandal they can scrape up on Obama couldn’t possible compete with the deep-seated hostilities that people have been nursing towards HRC since the first time she uttered the evil words “universal healthcare”.
I live in Nevada and have to choose between Obama and Hillary in a little over a week.
I actually like both of them, and will vote for whoever wins the Democratic Primary.
My only major concern with Hillary is her electability factor. Not that I think she can’t win, but the bile she causes when her name is mentioned in Republican circles makes me believe Republicans would crawl over broken glass to vote against her…bringing out voters from ICU’s who would carry their IV tubes to the election booth.
I don’t see the same deep-seeded hatred for Obama…even my right-wing Republican brother can find no real cause to “hate” Obama, other than the fact that he is a Democrat. But mention Hillary to him and the froth forms at his mouth.
My main decision centers around who will be able to win the General Election, and right now I am leaning towards Obama. Still, for me it is a choice between two very good people.
I’m a little amused by how Democrats approach Hillary Clinton’s ethical problems.
They seem to regard them as old news - nothing to get concerned over. But the fact of the matter is that there were so many incidents over so many years that it wasn’t old news so much as a pattern of behavior. What is more, the Norman Hsu mess shows that a lot of it hasn’t exactly gone away.
The last election had partisans on both sides arguing over what the candidates did thirty years ago or more, but Democrats seem to think Hillary’s issues will be old news to voters. This is a self-imposed delusion, IMHO.
I think it’s poor strategy because what Obama needs to do is to convince voters that he has enough experience to be an effective president and commander-in-chief. Nobody doubts his positivity, his enthusiasm… so I’d be making sure every policy wonk and grayhaired pol who thinks I’m all that and a bag of chips came out to my events. The Oprah campaign stops suggests that he’s favoring selling starpower over substance. To me, anyway. But you know something? In this thread and to people I know, it’s something that turned us off. Sell the message you have on specifics.
And to state that I and others see Oprah liking Obama and switching sides from him only because of it… that’s ridiculous. It speaks to a greater issue with the candidate, not realizing that he needs to sell the electorate on his credentials rather than the sizzle. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Oprah leans Dem… won’t affect my vote, regardless of what I think of her. A candidate who wanted to promote her endorsement by sharing the stump, I’m a little less impressed with.
So who are these Republicans that you suspect will block all that Hillary does? It’s not as if Newt is off in the retirement home. He still commands a great deal of respect from the GOP and was even hailed as a potential nominee in 2008. The symbolism here is great: the ideological foe of the centrist Democratic platform actually finds common ground with the person at the very epicenter of that platform. The GOP was sent a very strong message about the partisan hacks in their party in 2006.
How about working with Graham and others to provide insurance coverage for National Guard members when they’re not serving?
Which has all been heard before. Simply vilifying HRC because she is who she is will be off-putting to most of the electorate, who ostensibly want “change.” Maybe it’s the red meat that the “base” wants, but I think most Americans’ eyes glaze over when there’s a rehash of Whitewater, etc. And it’s difficult for HRC, because she can’t say too much about the Clinton years in Washington without provoking that same response. Obama’s got some challenges in explaining the participation of lobbyists and the use of PAC money in his campaign; it’s part of the political process, but by seizing claim to the mantle of doing things differently, he’s going to have to explain why he looks so much like the other pols out there in this regard.
And I say this as someone who thinks he will be a fine candidate for president eight years from now.
I think he should be doing that, too. But Oprah’s presence won’t keep him from doing so. Her presence will pick up the voters who don’t care about issues. So he’ll have to do some more work to pick up the others. But this is not an either/or dealie.
It’s easy to work with unpopular people if you don’t have to worry about being elected. It costs Newt nothing to work with Hillary because his job doesn’t depend on making Joe Six Pack Who Hates Hillary’s Guts happy. So mentioning him and his non-adversarial relationship with HRC doesn’t really allay my fears about Hillary trying to work with a combative Congress.
Okay. I can give you that. But can we say that’s really a politically significant accomplishment? I can’t imagine any Republican wanting their name associated with a fight against this kind of thing, so I’m not sure how weight this has in terms of evidence that HRC can harness the bipartisan support she will need to get UHC rolling.
I don’t get the same sense you to do about the electorate. But regardless, it’s clear to me that those who dislike her will continue to do so. Those who are just “eh, she’s okay when compared with the competition” may vote for her, but I suspect their turnout will be just like their attitude…iffy. If the GOP hits on some key attacks points (Whitewater being one of them), this might make their turnout even iffier.
Those who are really excited about her will definitely vote for her…I just haven’t seen that many people are who really excited about her. Maybe I have been looking at the wrong people, though.
If you think the Republicans in Congress (such as they remain after the elections) would do something different from that if some other Democrat were in the Oval Office, I think you missed 1992-2000. Or do you think they harbor a specific animosity to anyone named “Clinton” and would embrace the gospel of bipartisanship otherwise?
Google “Senator Clinton” “Senator Pothole” and you’ll get lots of links to stories like this
They will overlap with what you get when you Google “Senator Clinton” “Republicans in the Senate” “bipartisanship”, stories like this one.
Huge high-profile accomplishments requiring bipartisan support? Not so much. But a lot of little ones during her years as a Senator, which means many of those Republicans have in fact worked with her and that she has an everyday working relationship with them. Many of them have actually commented that they were expecting her to be, you know, ego city and impossible to work wtih, and that she’s totally the opposite. Yeah, her Republican colleagues have had pretty good things to say about her as a Senator. Seriously.
Will the Republicans in Congress be less cooperative when she has to spearhead high-profile initiatives, things where the scuttling of them can help weaken the Democratic party? One would assume that doing so would be part of the Republican’s natural opposition-party strategy. But I’m saying she knows these folks, has done deals with them before, and is a skilled & savvy backroom negotiator. I predict that she will have the Republican votes (as need be; they will most likely be a smaller minority party in both houses than they are at present) already lined up, due to deals made and horses traded, before she goes all high-profile and trots out an initiative and says to the American people “OK, we are going to do this”.
Yes, I do think they harbor a specific animosity towards Clinton, that goes above and beyond their general anti-Dem bias. Some of its due to sexism, some of its due to anti-Bill bias, some of its due to their memory of her as a go-getting First Lady, some of due to whatever. But I do believe that animosity is there.
I usually vote Republican. Since the Republicans are not out this year (just 2 Democratic parties as far as I can tell) I have to say that Clinton looks good to me.
The OP nailed my thinking well. She strikes me as someone who can get things done. I also don’t think of her as left-wing. She strikes me as right in the middle.
She strikes me as cold and calculating and she also strikes me as someone who wants America to do better. Maybe that is what we NEED right now. Cold & calculating is not necessarily a bad thing…
The feeling a get from her is that she wants talk/negotiations…that she is pacifistic at heart. However, I also feel that knows the world and will not take shit from anyone if it is heaped on us by whomever (like Iran).
I would be comfortable with her in the White House.
As Hillary herself said, you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Plus, even with the loss in New Hampshire, the whole candidate-as-movement thing seems to be working OK for him. Heck, the reasons he lost in NH appear to have nothing to do with any actual policies, but more with Clinton showing some humanity in the closing days of the campaign.
Excellent OP, by the way. As an Obama fan, I was none too happy on NH primary night, but the more I thought about it the more I was OK with it. I want both of them to earn this nomination, and I think both of them now realize they need to work their asses off. I think Hillary presumed the nomination was hers for awhile (which I found annoying), and I think Obama assumed the same thing for, well, 5 days (I guess I wasn’t the only one who sensed some cockiness in his NH speeches).
Still, my main concern is ending the horribly poisonous atmosphere that exists in Washington and is the biggest obstacle to getting anything done. Not only do I think Obama can do that, I also think Clinton can’t. Sadly, that’s not entirely her fault. But them’s the breaks.
Don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel.