They have a great deal to do with being an effective and beneficial leader.
OK, Hillary would do a better job than George Bush.
Talk about damning with faint praise.
LBJ would be remembered as one of our greatest presidents if not for Watergate. Carter inherited an impossible international situation and made the best of it anyone could have. And Clinton was neither a fuckup nor a liberal.
Aloow me to suggest a way to get off the Bush vs Hillary point… The difference between them is that Hillary, on her own, would be capable of getting where she is today even if it the odds would be against her (as they would ba against anyone). Bush, OTOH, would almost certainly not have made even Goverrnor of Texas, much less POTUS, on his own. OK? Hillary > Bush.
Can we get back to talking about an HRC presidency now?
Hmmm…did you mean Vietnam?
[ul]Competent, perhaps even excellent. (Philosophical and policy differences aside.)
Not as liberal as some conservatives fear. If Bill was center-left, Hillary would be left-center-left. The hard left will come to hate her.
At least as polarizing as Bush, if not more so, if for no other reasons than her track record and her personality.
Hawkish. For good or for ill, I’d rate her as likely as any major politician to use a military response in any given situation.[/ul]
I was specifically responding to a post of yours concerning “getting to the White House lawn” that is a political achievement, not a presidential one.
For the record I don’t think Hillary will be a better President than Bush because I do not think she will ever be President. As for being a better politician, I’ve seen no sign of that so far, Bush is one of the most controversial Presidents we’ve had in my lifetime, maligned by millions. Yet he was reelected and with a fairly commanding majority in the popular vote. If that isn’t evidence of him being a good politician then I do not know what is.
BrainGlutton, being a good leader and being a good politician are totally different things. In fact, some things necessary to being a good politician will actually hamstring your abilities as a leader and vice versa. It’s an unfortunate but necessary situation that our leaders have to be both.
IF you were actually interested in getting the discussion away from Hillary versus Bush you wouldn’t make a post claiming Hillary > Bush and then demand we move on.
I see no compelling reason to believe that Hillary would have made it to the Senate on her own anymore than Bush would have made it to the White House on his own.
Both of them used personal connections to establish a network of political allies and supporters. They took advantage of their unique situations and spun them into political success.
Considering the wide range of backgrounds that politicians come from, it’s impossible to say sans Bush’s father and sans Hillary’s husband where both would have ended up. Both showed some interest in politics at a young age and worked on political campaigns, although in Bush’s case his family had been involved in politics since prior to his birth, so it’s impossible to say if his interest in politics would have developed sans all of that or if he was interested in politics because he came from a political family.
I’d agree, Hillary is fairly moderate from everything I’ve seen. At lesat significantly more so than John Kerry was or Russ Feingold is, for example.
How polarizing she would be is difficult to say, so too is competency. The Presidency is a job like no other. Being Governor of a large state might give you some inkling of what the job entails, but even that is a poor substitute for the real thing. We’ve had some fairly incompetent Presidents in our history, some of them with backgrounds pre-Presidency that would make us think they would be nothing but successful.
Wouldn’t she then be a “Madam” President?" 
She’d overcompensate for not being a man. The hard decisions the US needs to make about its foreign policy would again be deferred. Universal health care would come through. Mainly though she’d be a president of small ambition and little real controversy. Lots of manufactured controversy, naturally.
LBJ… Watergate? You mean Vietnam right?
Yes.
Back to the OP. No, I don’t think she’d make a good President. I’m reminded of her going off the rails during her first tour as First Lady of Arkansas. Heavily feminist, she’d set gender politics back decades.
How does the second clause of that sentence follow from the first?
Wait, I forgot to throw in my two cents.
We could do worse than Hillary, and we have. I don’t particularly like her, and I don’t think she’s particularly smart, or particularly charismatic, but she’s far ahead of the current occupant of the white house on those qualities.
She does seem to be intellectually serious, and seems to have a philosophy that reasonable consensus policy proposals will be rewarded by political support. I don’t think she’s particularly ideological. While she might be “liberal”, I think she’s learned from her husband that moderate governance is what people want, and that’s what she’ll try to deliver.
Dang, all this is just getting me pissed off at George Bush. Y’know, it didn’t seem particularly outrageous to vote for him in 2000. Seriously, “Better than George Bush” isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement. But Bush isn’t running in 2008.
Can you elaborate? She always struck me as being at least as smart as Bill, and maybe smarter.
On that I agree.
If I compare her to any of the rest of the Democratic crew that’s running, she seems no worse than most, and better than some. Gotta remember-- it’s all relative. I’m starting to recognize what people see in Obama, but I just think it’s too early for him. He needs to go off and be governor somewhere first. Or maybe VP. VP would be great for him. Hillary/Obama could be a strong ticket.
We’re grading on a curve here. Yeah, she’s smarter than your average person, but she’s not brilliant, or a quick thinker or a deep thinker. She’s normal smart. Bill always seemed smarter to me, like he was two steps ahead of everyone else. Maybe it’s because she always seems so tightly controlled when she talks, like she’s afraid of making a mistake. Bill could just…discourse…about anything and everything, at length.
For all Bill’s phoniness, he was a genuine phoney, if you get what I mean. It was like he was a phoney, and we knew he was a phoney, and he knew we knew, and we knew he knew we knew, but we appreciated that he’d take the time to put on that phoney false front for us, because he knew how much it meant to us.
With Hillary, she doesn’t know that we know.
How do you know that she doesn’t know that we know? Y’know?
She is owned by tjhe same people who own Bush. She will be more human than the screw everybody who is not rich group in power.,But the system has been taken over. We now have a capitaliocracy. Business owns us and sets up and maintains the system for their benefit.Until a 3rd party comes in we are done.