I think Hillary’s smart enough to know that she needs a message and she isn’t going to win just by being Hillary. By the same token, why get specific on policy now? The sooner she comes out with position papers, the sooner the Republicans will start to fine tune their opposition. Let he win the nomination, then see who she’s running against, then come out with the message.
Seconded.
Here’s some more stuff on Martin O’Malley, BTW. I think I like this guy:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/may_june_2013/features/should_martin_omalley_be_presi044513.php?page=all
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/09/15/that-time-martin-omalley-dressed-up-like-a-general-from-the-war-of-1812/
I’m sure those who normally vote will be as motivated to vote as always. But historically, Democratic turnout is always suspect, even in Presidential elections. What happened in 2008 and 2012 is not the new normal. Democrats could very well go back to sleep if Hillary runs an Alison Lundergan Grimes type campaign.
She’s been a really famous political figure for an incredibly long time for people to not really know who she is and what she believes.
The one thing we do know for sure is something that won’t do her much good among the Democratic base: she’s hawkish as hell, and may end up being a bigger foreign policy hawk than the Republican nominee. I’m not sure how that motivates Democratic voters. “Cuts to food stamps or war with Iran! What a choice!”
A nice profile of Sherrod Brown, my Democratic U.S. senator, and why he’s not running for President: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/sherrod-brown-why-arent-progressives-begging-him-to-run-for-president/2015/01/28/f8378d9c-a63c-11e4-a7c2-03d37af98440_story.html
It’s horrible to say, but I almost wish she would have a stroke or something this year and be unable to run. She’s at an age where that’s a concern, and it might be better to get her out of the way. The Democrats need a better plan than banking on her health for the the next nine years.
He was??
I was watching the 2008 primary campaign pretty closely, and I don’t remember any instances where Bill made much of a difference at all.
Gotta say, I don’t remember this either.
(Mostly, I remember those ‘3am phone call’ ads. The second one was a real clunker, because that 3am phone call was about the economy. Has there ever been a time when the President of the United States needed to be awakened at 3am to intervene in the economy before the rest of America woke up? Buahahahahha!!)
And books like “Game Change” are wonderful inside-baseball tales, but they are terrible at differentiating things that made a difference from things that didn’t. So I think it’s up to you to show that the things you’ve quoted were indeed pivotal.
IMHO, two macro things killed Clinton, one macro and one tactical. The macro thing was that she was a big supporter of the Iraq War, and Obama was an opponent of the war, at a time when that very much mattered to large numbers of Democrats.
The tactical thing was that whoever in the Clinton campaign was in charge of understanding the math of primaries and caucuses, totally fucked up. While Clinton coasted for a month after Super Tuesday, the Obama organization was cleaning up on small states and caucus states where the delegates weren’t allocated proportionally. During the post-Super Tuesday part of February, Clinton went from being slightly ahead to being 100 delegates behind, and was fighting from behind the rest of the way.
I remember that some remark of Obama’s got played into a gaffe by the Hillary folks just ahead of NH, and helped swing that state back to her when it looked like Obama was going to roll there too. But that’s about the only instance where some remark or another really made a difference, AFAICT.
PA, I believe, actually. Obama had a private-home fundraiser in San Francisco a week or so prior to the PA primary in which someone recorded him saying something about people being bitter and clinging to their guns and religion.
I think she would be a perfectly serviceable president. If her health fails, that’s why you have VPs, and given the VP role or the replacement candidate role would likely be filled by the same people, I don’t see an advantage to her dropping out.
Tom Vilsack is a frontrunner for VP, and he’d make a great President. Plus he’ll give Jon Stewart an excuse to bring back that duck that keeps saying, “Vilsack!”
I’ll be expecting a firm statement soon from Hillary Clinton on whether she supports the President’s request for $500 billion more than was spent last year. What are the odds that we’ll get such a firm statement? Anyone want to place bets?
Why do you expect Mrs. Clinton to comment on this more than you expect any of the other Republican or Democratic candidates to do so?
She is no longer part of his cabinet and is not even a declared candidate. Why should she say anything?
We all know she’s planning to run, we just need to know if she’s going to pursue a policy of balanced budgets like her husband did, or if she’s going to do permanent deficit spending and massive yearly increases in spending as the current President is. Or at least is trying to do.
Then there’s the fact that even her supporters can’t articulate what she actually believes, and she’s been in public life for a very long time. Wouldn’t it be nice to get an idea of what kind of President she’ll be?
I get the feeling she’s going to face the Ed Kennedy problem. She’ll be asked why she wants to be President and won’t have an answer beyond her name.
Suits me! He graduated from the same high school I did; I’ve followed his career a bit since and have always liked him. Quite a bit premature to call him a “frontrunner for VP,” though, since who the Presidential nominee is - gender, race, region, background, experience, Electoral College needs, etc. - has a great deal to do with who his or her running mate will be.
She has nothing to gain by making any statement about it at this time, so why would she do so?
She won’t. That’s part of the problem. She will try to say as few meaningful things as possible.
No politician would do so this early.
I’m not offended if she waits until the campaign starts to begin to articulate her platform. And, I would be shocked if she didn’t come out in favor of balanced budgets and apple pie. How can she not?
O’Malley, like Jerry Brown, represents how progressivism can work in practice. In a world where we actually looked at candidates based on what they’ve done rather than their star power, O’Malley would be the frontrunner.