First of all some disclosure. I am not a liberal. I try not to get too involved with the personalities of politicians so I don’t have any strong feelings about her personally. But one thing that amazes me is how far to the right HC has been able to move without losing any support from the left.
A couple of possibilities come to mind. Maybe she hasn’t moved that far to the right. Maybe she has and she’s lost some support but I’m not reading about it.
But it seems to me that she could slowly and steadily move to the right of Tom Delay on every issue and her base would come with her.
So, I’d like to throw out a few queestions to liberals on the board:
What do you think of HC for POTUS?
If you do support her, is there any limit to when you would drop her - support for vouchers, privatizing SS, bigger tax cuts?
Do you believe that no matter what she says now, that she’ll be a true liberal once elected?
Who else would you support for POTUS, whether or not she’s your first choice?
Finally I put this post here to get a poll of members kind of thread. I’m not interested in debating her character or positions on this board.
Has she made available a poisition statement? I make the default assumption that putting Hilary back in office would be tantamount to putting Bill back in office, but that could be very wrong because I really don’t know what her views are.
I would love to see her in the White House, I think she’d make a terrific president–but it’s never going to happen. And I hope the Democrats are not stupid enough to put her anywhere near the next ticket, we need someone who has some realistic chance of winning.
I hope she doesn’t run, because I think a lot of Democrats would instantly jump on her bandwagon thinking she’d be the most “viable” candidate, but I just don’t think she can handle the job emotionally. I may be completely wrong here, but I have an image of her as being someone who is way too angry and controlling and generally controlled by her own emotional responses to ever be anything like a good president. She’s very smart, very dedicated, she works very hard, yadda yadda yadda – so let her stay in the Senate as long as the people of New York state want her there. Let Kennedy retire (please, Massachusetts?), and let her take over as “the great liberal voice of the Senate.”
Unless you’re suggesting that she’s not as liberal as many seem to think she is, about which I have no opinion.
She reminds me of when Elizabeth Dole was running for president and everyone said the poor woman could never do the job because she’s a control freak and would just implode.
AFAIK she has not ever said she wanted to be president, so who knows?
I couldn’t agree more. I like her and respect her credentials and would support her if she ran, but she has zero chance of winning a national election. The Democratic establishment seems to have no idea how loathed she by so many. Deserved or not, her very name riles up the right like no one else save Michael Moore. If she runs, it is all over for the Democrats. She’d lose by double digits.
I hate her- especially for her opinions on video games/movies (who will think of the children!!) and I would vote for nearly any other liberal besides her. However, if she was the one running I’d support her. I think we’ve all learned that even a crappy liberal is better than a great republican.
My opinion of her aside, I think that Kathleen Blanco’s (governor of Louisiana) handling of the Hurricane Katrina incident is going to make things VERY difficult for any female politician for a long time, especially with voters in the South.
I’m not saying that ALL potential female politicians would break down emotionally under stress and fail to handle a crisis situation, but Americans reluctantly started electing ladies to public office 20 or 30 years ago and this is going to set that back a LONG way.
Her being Hillary…or Blanco…I’m not discussing my opinion on either one of them…just making an observation on the way people seem to be thinking about female politicians in general.
I don’t know enough about her positions to make such a a ringing endorsement (and I know she jumped on the “video games make kids killers” idiot bandwagon as even sven notes), but I’m sure I’ll agree with her more than any Republican, if history is any indication. But I agree it would be suicide to put her on the ticket, even as a vice presidential candidate.
I think she’d be a good president, but her reputation is too much of a liability. It will energize the Republican base more than any other Democratic candidate, and she’d be easy to portray as a candidate to hate. In addition, she lacks the likeability factor that made GW Bush president: he won twice because voters thought of him as a nice guy; few voters think of her in that light. Finally, most voters have already made up their mind about her qualities; it’d be better if someone less well-known (and less threatening) got the nomination.
Thanks for the responses so far. It’s interesting that the thread sparks some interest - 157 views and 10 replies in less than three hours - but no one except me seems too interested in the specific questions I posed.
I’m not sure if I count as a liberal these days - maybe I do. Anyway, I think Hillary is going to run and win in '08, but I’m not a fan.
I think it’s become clear she isn’t. From her position on the Iraq war to the video game thing to her public appearances with Newt Gingrich and work with Lindsey Graham, she has spent her whole term trying to carve out a niche in the middle.
Too conservative for my tastes, and she’d be too good a rallying figure for the right. The right has always had this insane hatred of the Clintons, for no reason I can see; it’s not like they are all that far to the left, or bad people by Washington standards.
I don’t think that’s true. But I do think, if anything, the anti-Hilary backlash has been overestimated. It’s not 1995. She’s not the President’s wife, and (although it’s just my interpretation) she has been a somewhat low-key Senator, given her fame. I think Republicans who expect her to lose because “people hate her” would be in for the same surprise as Democrats who expected Bush to lose in 200 because “he’s an idiot.”
