Whaddaya mean? How is HRC any more pro-war than any other Senate Democrat?
You can’t honestly believe that.
Which is why a Senator cannot get the Democratic nomination. Sure, if the Governor who will eventually get the nomination had been a Senator rather than a Governor they would have voted for the war just like everyone else. But in real life these Governors didn’t vote for the war. And so they get a major boost during the primaries, since there’s a core of Democratic party activists who won’t be able to forgive anyone who voted for the war.
It’s true of any pol who *ever * puts career before principle. pantom is as entitled to believe that of her as of almost any other pol, and with a comparable amount of evidence.
The one thing she has going for her above any other plausible nominee is that she’s attack-proof. The RW hate machine has done everything it can to her, there’s nothing more they can say, no more minds to make up against her, and it hasn’t worked. Anything more they can say can only backfire.
His last major act as governor (pushing through a tax increase with doom-and-gloom talk at a time when the budget was actually in a state of increasing surplus) leaves him wide open to the charge that Democrats think of tax increases as the first and only resort.
Hillary is absolutely the wrong choice for the party. I’m sure she would carry the usual lineup of blue states. It’s the “purple” states where she would fail, and those are the states you must win (at least some of them) to get the victory.
But he got Republican state legislators to support his tax increases - I don’t know if that was the case for that specific increase, but I’m sure he did that earlier. Maybe that doesn’t eliminate the charge, but it’s a positive mark for him. Given that and his popularity, he must have been able to persuade somebody it was a good idea.
I agree. The Dems won’t even have to play the racism card, or the sexism card, the Pubbie voters will play those cards for them.
I think that Kerry losing the election is a not unrealistic indicator.
hh
Apparently, us republicans don’t believe in this strategy. We love to nominate the most un-electable candidate.
As I see Brain Glutton is lionizing her for her health care plan, which brought up extremely bad memories of the day I started to detest Hillary, some facts that go to her competence:
I remember, sometime in 92 or 93, having a conversation with the finance guy at the company I was working for at the time. He used to come by to the computer room to shoot the breeze with us techies, because he considered us a few of the only truly sane people in the entire company.
This was a retailer, a small to midsize employer of, at that time, around 500 people. They were self-insured. He was kvetching about the cost of the insurance, and seriously backing a government solution to the whole healthcare mess we have.
It’s difficult to remember now, nearly 15 years later, but when Clinton was elected support for some form of universal health care was well-nigh, um, universal. But don’t take it from me; here’s a quote from a blog that covers health care and the issues around it rather well, summarizing the debacle that became the Hillary health plan, and bringing up this same point, and the one that I remember with crystalline clarity even after all this time, that Hillary made a complete botch of the effort:
The first point was to be expected, and there’s nothing you can do about that, obviously. But the second and third are keys: it’s how she snatched defeat from what at first was almost certain victory.
I’ve detested her ever since. If not for her insistence on producing a mammoth tome that did nothing but bury the whole effort, we might have universal healthcare today.
Her entire term as First Lady brought discredit to her, everything from Travelgate (remember that?) to how she mangled this. Her first term as Senator, where every time I pick up the paper she seems to be on the wrong side of yet another issue, isn’t doing anything to mitigate my view of her.
Between her demonstrated lack of competence and her wishy-washiness on the issues, we would be getting a left-wing version of Dubya on competence and his father on steadfastness in the face of opposition (Read my lips!..etc). Not a good combination.
But I suppose that’s a hijack, since it doesn’t answer the question of whether she could get elected.
If a Dem like myself can come up with this stuff, imagine what will happen in an actual campaign. So to the question of whether she could win, now or ever, in any national election, the answer is: really, you must be kidding.
Warner sold the tax increase by spinning fairy tales about impending budget meltdown, loss of Virginia’s solid bond rating, etc. Now that these accounts have turned out to be… shall we say “no longer operative”… his credibility as someone who can build bridges to the Republican side is pretty well spent.
It’s worth noting that the Warner’s successor (Tim Kaine - D) tried to get a transportation tax increase, and has run into firm “fool me twice, shame on me” opposition from the Republicans in the General Assembly, including the ones who broke ranks and supported Warner on his tax increase. This is probably a good thing in terms of public policy (the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough money flowing into Richmond, it’s that they squander it on downstate pork rather than investing in where the traffic problems actually exist), but isn’t a promising sign for the long-term results of Warner’s political methods.
Really? Entrenched opposition had nothing to do with it?
Remember any of that? No?
Yes, the plan as proposed (before Congress had a chance to hack it up) probably would have resulted in health care decisions being made on financial grounds by distant government bureaucrats. Instead, the HMO system has evolved so that health care decisions are being made on financial grounds by distant *corporate * bureaucrats. Whew, we sure survived a close call there, didn’t we? :rolleyes:
And what in between? *Anything * you can name? Well, let’s look at this “Travelgate” stuff, just for education’s sake:
He was acquitted, yes - but what else should the new Administration have done? If they hadn’t fired him, imagine the outcry. Oh, wait, he was a leftover Bush appointee - never mind.
So what you have against her is how the Clintons’ attempt to actually do something about universal health care got sabotaged. Perhaps every attack on the Clintons really has been their own fault, regardless of the piddling little facts. Perhaps you see how unconvincing a case you present.
Or perhaps not.
I remember that IBM and the AMA were strongly for it at the beginning, and deadset against it at the end.
There’s a reason for that: they were excluded from the decisionmaking on the structure of the plan, and quite reasonably decided to be against the bureaucratic monstrosity she created. IBM’s decision to oppose it made the front page of The Times at the time, it was such big news.
There’s always entrenched opposition, btw. This is a process that is called, last time I checked, politics. If you want a world without opposition to an initiative, you’ll be waiting a long time indeed.
Actually I’m lionizing her for having a national health-care plan. Single-payer would have been a better choice, but that barely comprehensible “managed care” would have been much better than nothing.
Ideals without execution are what got us Dubya and Iraq.
Or, come to think of it, what got us to the mess we call our health-care system today, since Hillary flubbed a once-in-a-generation chance to actually turn it into a real, functioning, fixable system.
She’s worse than useless, she’s dangerous.
I’ll take a pass.