Huckleman2000
It was something I ate.
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Has anyone ever seen a slip so Freudian?JAMESBJOHNSON said:
Giuliani v. Hillary-- prognosticators, gurus,
- Thread starter Pure
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Polarbear57
FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
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@All
With Greetings from Germany, please nominate Hillary.
With Greetings from Germany, please nominate Hillary.
BareFootPagan
Really Experienced
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You have me curious now, what party do you vote in Germany, and why do you think we shoud Nominate Hillary?
Roxanne Appleby
Masterpiece
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Um - an unbroken record of strong economic growth, strong job growth, and essentially full employment, beginning precisely when they went into effect? And in the past couple years, delayed somewhat as per normal for a period of economic revovery, strong wage growth?Pure said:
Naturally, you will be able to produce a few thousand words explaining all that away - as your side does all those other times that strong growth and full employment have followed supply side tax cuts. Whatever.
Not really, although those who condemn the Iraq adventure as an unmitigated failure have no more authority than those who proclaim that it is promoting our interests or security in various ways. The truth is, only the judgement of history will have any real authority here, and that court won't convene for at least another 50 years.Pure said:
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Pure
Fiel a Verdad
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pure //OK, giving you the tax cuts as achievements, can you supply a couple more items for the list? //
rox Not really,
i didn't think so.
-----
evidence?
rox: Um - an unbroken record of strong economic growth, strong job growth, and essentially full employment, beginning precisely when they went into effect? And in the past couple years, delayed somewhat as per normal for a period of economic revovery, strong wage growth?
Um--6 [correction*] billion a month in war spending being entirely irrelevant.
---
* several figures are floating around, some issued by the army. this is a middling one.
rox Not really,
i didn't think so.
-----
evidence?
rox: Um - an unbroken record of strong economic growth, strong job growth, and essentially full employment, beginning precisely when they went into effect? And in the past couple years, delayed somewhat as per normal for a period of economic revovery, strong wage growth?
Um--6 [correction*] billion a month in war spending being entirely irrelevant.
---
* several figures are floating around, some issued by the army. this is a middling one.
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Roxanne Appleby
Masterpiece
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This was an edit to my previous but it will serve here better:Pure said:pure //OK, giving you the tax cuts as achievements, can you supply a couple more items for the list? //
rox Not really,
i didn't think so.
-----
evidence?
rox: Um - an unbroken record of strong economic growth, strong job growth, and essentially full employment, beginning precisely when they went into effect? And in the past couple years, delayed somewhat as per normal for a period of economic revovery, strong wage growth?
Um--10 billion a month in war spending being entirely irrelevant.
Good God, don't look to me to defend the Bush admin! I'm a flaming libertarian, for goodness sake. I just react badly to the heavy-breathing fever swamp rants of the angry left. As I did to the heavy breathing fever swamp rants of the angry right during the Clinton years (at least post 1994).
And BTW - Re. Huck's "increased the national debt by more than all of the previous administrations combined." In terms of percent of GDP, deficits have plummeted the last few years even with out of control spending, due to record-high tax revenues. So Pure's "$10 billion/month in war spending," implying some massive Keynesian guns-not-butter stimulus, doesn't really stand up as an explanation for strong real GDP growth.
There is really no substitute for economic growth - whatever may ail a body politic, slower growth only makes it worse.
"Make jobs not money" really is not a credible economic, tax or fiscal policy.
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Roxanne Appleby
Masterpiece
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Thank you, Pure. See post No. 15.
Edited: Never mind, I'll repost it -
Edited: Never mind, I'll repost it -
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Harryin VA
Experienced
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It figures a fucking whacko like you would come up with this sort of fucking crazy scenario
thebullet said:
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Harryin VA
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Hillary Cant Win
I have been an Edwards a supporter since early in 2004 ... I voted Democrat 65% of the time but sometimes I will vote independent if there is something or someone to get excited about .
Hillary cannot win 2008 anymore than John Kerry could in 2004... why? B/c she will lsoe folks like me. Independent sdwiong make voters like me ...
There is NOT a BRIBE big enough in this country that will get me to vote for Hillary....
this iss a CHANGE election ....
1988 BUSH..... 1992 CLINTON.... 1996 CLINTON .....
2000 BUSH...... 2004 BUSH
2008..... say what you wnat about Hillary .... but anyone who thinks Hillary is CHANGE.... given the past 20 years....is delusional
I have been an Edwards a supporter since early in 2004 ... I voted Democrat 65% of the time but sometimes I will vote independent if there is something or someone to get excited about .
Hillary cannot win 2008 anymore than John Kerry could in 2004... why? B/c she will lsoe folks like me. Independent sdwiong make voters like me ...
There is NOT a BRIBE big enough in this country that will get me to vote for Hillary....
this iss a CHANGE election ....
1988 BUSH..... 1992 CLINTON.... 1996 CLINTON .....
2000 BUSH...... 2004 BUSH
2008..... say what you wnat about Hillary .... but anyone who thinks Hillary is CHANGE.... given the past 20 years....is delusional
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
Peggy Noonan has some interesting comments about Hillary.
Hillary is for and against most things, simultaneously. Hillary is notoriously guarded and resistant to expressing what she knows. Hillary runs with America's wealthiest people, and it's a certainty she will not raise taxes on her friends. American's dont trust Hillary....they trust Bill.
Hillary is for and against most things, simultaneously. Hillary is notoriously guarded and resistant to expressing what she knows. Hillary runs with America's wealthiest people, and it's a certainty she will not raise taxes on her friends. American's dont trust Hillary....they trust Bill.
Polarbear57
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Yeah, you are right, even People here in Old Europe trust Bill, it's simply poor that there is no Chance for another Period as a U.S. President, here in Germany, we have for 4 Periods (16 Years) the same Chancelor, belive me, we have good times with him.JAMESBJOHNSON said:
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
Unfortunately, Hillary is the crazy old aunt who sleeps in the attic, and if she's elected President Bill will spend the entire time fixing her fuck-ups.
Everyone has worked for families like the Clintons.
I suspect she may get nominated just for the entertainment of America. But at some time she'll have to make a choice between getting in the gladiator's arena OR remaining in the Emperor's Box waving her hanky and smiling.
Everyone has worked for families like the Clintons.
I suspect she may get nominated just for the entertainment of America. But at some time she'll have to make a choice between getting in the gladiator's arena OR remaining in the Emperor's Box waving her hanky and smiling.
thebullet
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God God! Don't even suggest it. That wouldn't mean 8 more years of Bill, it would mean 8 more years of George! If that happens, call in the dogs.
To me, none of the major candidates from either party have much appeal. I guess I kinda like Richardson, but he can't be nominated. At one time I supported Mccain, but he knuckled under to the extreme right and has become a disappointment.
We need someone from the center to try to erase some of the more heinous goings ons of the last two terms. We need someone to bring some fiscal responsibility to the office. We need someone who has some idea of what foreign policy is or should be.
To the person who claims we are in a period of unprecedented economic growth:
Get your head out of your ass. Yes, we are in a era of unprecedented economic growth, for the extremely rich, that is. They are doing just great. Of course they are riding the backs of the middle and lower classes, who frankly ain't doing so well.
Let me give a personal, painful example. Yesterday my wife received information about changes in her health insurance policy. The big news was trumpeted on the announcement form: the cost of the policy was not going up! All right! No increase in our health insurance! Uh, wait. Better read the fine print. Yes, we are paying the same, but better not get sick. Our deductible went way up. The things that are covered went down. Net result: a few trips to the doctor and she is making less than when she was hired three years ago, even including her yearly raises.
She wasn't getting raises, her employer was simply moving the money around. That's the typical conservative strategy of giving with the right hand while taking away with the left.
Don't tell me the country is in a period of unprecedented economic growth. Tell it to Bill Gates. I'm just a common guy and I'm being fucked in the ass.
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
"I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.
I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: "We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well." But we won't. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.
I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama's new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton's generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don't think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.
Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week."
PEGGY NOONAN
I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: "We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well." But we won't. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.
I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama's new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton's generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don't think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.
Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week."
PEGGY NOONAN
thebullet
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JAMESBJOHNSON said:
I have a difficult time understanding this hatred for Hillary. She means nothing to me politically, just another candidate. Crazy old lady? Why do you say that? I just don't get it. From all accounts she has been an extremely effective legislator. She's extremely popular in New York, even gaining support among Republicans.
Here is a quote from a couple of years ago in the New York Times:
Why do you people hate her? WTF has she done to you?
If she is the Democratic nominee, I'll almost certainly vote for her, given the half-assed collection of right wing wannabees trying to get the Republican nomination. But I won't be enthusiastic. Still, I don't understand the unrestrained hatred. What has she ever done to make you so stridently hateful?
Somebody please explain.
rgraham666
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thebullet said:
She's a liberal, and she's a Clinton. What more do you need?
cloudy
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thebullet said:
I'm in no way republican, and I don't hate Hillary, but I don't like her very much. I can't give you everyone's reasons, of course, but to me she seems no different than any of the people running for the republican nomination. She's too slick, the whole whitewater thing bothers me, and the way she handled the bruhaha with her husband bothered me (just to name a few things). She reads as "dishonest" to me, and that's why I don't like her.
eta: Rob, that may be the case for some, certainly (carny comes to mind), but for most that's way over-simplified.
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thebullet
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Harry in VA said:
Yo, Harry. What are you doing in the AUTHOR'S HANGOUT? Are we to assume that you have something you have posted or plan to post as an actual work of fiction? Or are you merely trolling, as usual?
God, I hope you have written something. We've all been waiting for the second coming of Hemmingway.
I assure you, when you do actually post something, I'll be the first to give you the kind of extremely positive critique that you yourself are famous for.
Yo, Harry. What are you doing in the AUTHOR'S HANGOUT? Are we to assume that you have something you have posted or plan to post as an actual work of fiction? Or are you merely trolling, as usual?
God, I hope you have written something. We've all been waiting for the second coming of Hemmingway.
I assure you, when you do actually post something, I'll be the first to give you the kind of extremely positive critique that you yourself are famous for.
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
BULLET
C'mon! Youre confusing conservatives with bandits.
My company did the same with the insurance. Insurance premiums now equal about half of the pay clerks make at my office.
I just read an MD expose written by a retired doctor. MDs dont give a fuck about patients. Even when a person has a simple malady the MD does tests and uses expensive diagnostic equipment because he/she owns stock in the company that does the testing or makes the crystal ball. Patients are cows to be milked and sheep to be fleeced. All of them do it, and the costs go up and up.
C'mon! Youre confusing conservatives with bandits.
My company did the same with the insurance. Insurance premiums now equal about half of the pay clerks make at my office.
I just read an MD expose written by a retired doctor. MDs dont give a fuck about patients. Even when a person has a simple malady the MD does tests and uses expensive diagnostic equipment because he/she owns stock in the company that does the testing or makes the crystal ball. Patients are cows to be milked and sheep to be fleeced. All of them do it, and the costs go up and up.
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
Hillary is what Florence King calls THE GREAT GIRL, the female version of BIG MAN ON CAMPUS. Hillary is the sort of person you wouldnt associate with in high school...SENIOR SUPERLATIVE, EDITOR OF THE SCHOOL NEWSPAPER, NATIONAL HONOR SOCIETY, TEACHERS PET.
Hillary's only core conviction is Hillary.
She didnt grow up in poverty or suffer abusive parents or experience discrimination of any kind. Every step of the way she has been carried along. She's never made a mortgage payment or owned a business or written any of the books she published.
Hillary is the poster child for the rich and pampered Liberals hate. She is the female Dubya.
Hillary's only core conviction is Hillary.
She didnt grow up in poverty or suffer abusive parents or experience discrimination of any kind. Every step of the way she has been carried along. She's never made a mortgage payment or owned a business or written any of the books she published.
Hillary is the poster child for the rich and pampered Liberals hate. She is the female Dubya.
thebullet
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JBJ Said:
Hillary has achieved what she has pretty much on her own, up until Bill's presidency. Everything GW has achieved has been due to his family connections.
I don't want to be put in the position of defending her, because my support for her is reserved at best. Still, none of the answers I have received about the Hillary hatred makes the least bit of sense to me.
You hate her because you hate her. That's about it.
That's just crazy. No one can dispute Hilary's intelligence. Everyone can dispute GW's intelligence. No one can dispute Hillary's work ethic. Dubya has taken more vacation time than any president in history. She never owned her own business but she certainly earned her way. She was a top-flight lawyer making a shit-pot full of money.
Hillary has achieved what she has pretty much on her own, up until Bill's presidency. Everything GW has achieved has been due to his family connections.
I don't want to be put in the position of defending her, because my support for her is reserved at best. Still, none of the answers I have received about the Hillary hatred makes the least bit of sense to me.
You hate her because you hate her. That's about it.
J
JAMESBJOHNSON
Guest
BULLET
Flip your question around. Why is Hillary better than anyone else? How will she make your life better?
I think she'll fuck things up bad, thats why I support her candidacy. I think she's the medicine America needs to take.
Oh! She isnt running against Dubya. Just in case you forgot. Her campaign theme cant be, "AT LEAST I'M SMARTER THAN DUBYA." All of her opponents are smarter than Dubya.
Flip your question around. Why is Hillary better than anyone else? How will she make your life better?
I think she'll fuck things up bad, thats why I support her candidacy. I think she's the medicine America needs to take.
Oh! She isnt running against Dubya. Just in case you forgot. Her campaign theme cant be, "AT LEAST I'M SMARTER THAN DUBYA." All of her opponents are smarter than Dubya.
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thebullet
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JAMESBJOHNSON said:
What made you think that I consider Hillary better than anyone else? Seems to me that I wrote that my support for her is lukewarm at best. I would much prefer Bill Richardson if it comes to that. I prefer Obama, though he is a bit green yet.
Why do you think she will fuck things up? That makes no sense to me. She is very conservative in her actions, and not nearly as liberal in her politics as her haters seem to think. I think she will be an able administrator if nothing else.
Your explanations make as little sense to me as your hatred.
If you think America needs more medicine after being given two great big doses of GW Bush, you must be Osama fuckin' bin Laden!
Pure
Fiel a Verdad
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Conservative column on Hillary strengths and the Anti Hilliary effort
roxanne, _us economic strength.
check the Dollar Index, and reports of Chinese getting nervous and diversifying (more euros, proportionately).
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ai.WadiYZqBk&refer=home
---
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_10_22/cover.html
October 22, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
It Takes an Agenda
Conservatives cannot live by Hillary-hate alone.
by David Weigel
It’s a balmy, beer-drinking evening in the middle of August, and the conservatives trickling in to a meeting of the Robert A. Taft Club can’t enjoy it. They’re mostly under-30 Washington professionals, and they’re fed up with the Republican Party. They think George W. Bush’s bumbling and ideological hat-trading have reduced the conservative movement to a pitiable, piddling state. If Karl Rove stepped inside, he’d come out looking like Oscar de la Hoya after a bout gone wrong.
They settle into a debate about the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Panelists take turns whipping the party for its sins. “We beat them on immigration,” says Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer, “but right now, we just don’t have the strength or the resources to affect public policy the way we want to.” He beseeches the crowd to help save the movement, but that gets a muted reaction. So he steps it up: “I still think that in the short term, as many problems as we have right now, Hillary Clinton can bring conservatives back together.”
The name does the trick: soft laughter moves around the room. Keeping Hillary out of the White House is literally the only motivation some conservatives have to pull the Republican lever in 2008, especially if their party nominates a pro-choice candidate for the first time since 1976. “Just enough people might go to the polls next November nursing one conviction that trumps all others,” Terence Jeffrey wrote a few weeks after the panel (which he also appeared on). “There’s no way they would vote for Hillary Clinton.” Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard executive editor and a sturdy weathervane for Republican popular opinion, expressed the same thing in a late-September column: “Nearly all Republicans, plus a lot of independents, rally around the need to defeat Senator Hillary Clinton and keep her away from the presidency. So it follows, not entirely logically, that they wish for her to win the Democratic nomination.”
Is this wishful thinking from a party and a movement on the ropes? Not according to pollsters. There are voters who have given up on the GOP over the last few years and utterly loathe the Clintons in general or Hillary in particular. Americans are aching to vote Democratic, and polls that test a generic Republican candidate against a generic Democrat give Clinton’s party a double-digit lead. But their enthusiasm flags when they ponder the flesh-and-blood Democratic frontrunner. Pollster Scott Rasmussen points out that at least 45 percent of Americans don’t like Clinton personally. She simply rubs them the wrong way—in every way. Despite that generic lead, she only ties or narrowly outpaces Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain.
“Of the top three Democratic candidates, she’s absolutely the weakest in the general election,” Rasmussen says. “Hillary is a unifying factor for Republicans, and Republicans aren’t otherwise unified. If Hillary is the nominee, this is a competitive race.”
But see if you can spot the problem. Conservatives are fraught, angry at their traditional party, unable to decide on a standard-bearer, unsure even what they stand for. They don’t think this is the year to sort those problems out. [...]
On the Right, the list of grievances was even longer. Both Clintons were seen as ambassadors of 1960s radicalism and cultural decadence, and Hillary was the worse of the two: a pro-choice feminist who didn’t take her husband’s name until pollsters told her it would help him make a political comeback.
Yet for all of that outrage, Republicans lost that election to the Clintons. And the hope that voters will see what they see and reject what the Clintons stand for resembles the plan Democrats clung to in 2004. They choose John Kerry on the theory he would be the least controversial general-election candidate, then counted on an electorate fed up with George W. Bush to deliver the election.
In the nearly three years since, Hillary has been the de facto Democratic candidate. The Right’s efforts to attack her have fallen completely, pathetically flat. Her popularity is low, but not much lower than Bush’s was in 2004. If the linchpin of a 2008 campaign is unifying Republicans in the cause of defeating Hillary, it might be enough to stitch together most of the conservative movement—but not enough to win.
Compare the efforts of 2007 to the efforts of 1999 and 2000. After First Lady Hillary Clinton started seeking a Senate seat, Republican donors practically sprained their wrists signing checks. Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal whom Republicans weren’t as comfortable with then as now, raised more than $20 million. When Giuliani left the race, Rep. Rick Lazio raised $4.5 million in six weeks.
That wasn’t the limit of the Hillary effect. The National Republican Senatorial Committee saw its donations surge when it asked supporters to banish the Clintons from Washington once and for all. By the middle of 2000, the committee raised $20 million, twice as much as it had raised in 1998 and triple what it raised in 1996. “She’s now the Republican Party’s No. 1 fundraiser,” said a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to a reporter from The Hill.
It was a simpler time. This past July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a “quiz” to donors that warned, “Hillary Clinton is calling Senate Democrats to push a passage of measures to institute government-run healthcare.” Imagine, a President Hillary Clinton with a massive Senate majority to do her bidding! But appeals like that have done nothing for the NRSC: their Democratic counterparts have out-raised them by $34.1 to $18.1 million. The month of the quiz letter, the Democrats beat them by $2.7 to $2.2 million.
It’s the same story in the presidential race. Since the start of the year, the nine remaining Republican candidates have raised about $104 million. The Democrats, including Clinton, have raised $144.3 million. When John McCain campaign manager Rick Davis sent out an 11th-hour fundraising e-mail, he played what he thought was his strongest card: “There are many reasons to support John McCain, but as we approach this quarter’s fundraising deadline Saturday at midnight, let me remind you of just one of them: John McCain is the only candidate who can defeat Hillary Clinton.” That was the prelude to a weak finance report and a staff purge that completed McCain’s descent to hobbled dark horse.
And those efforts have been absolute triumphs compared to the third-party anti-Hillary efforts and PACs. The first sign that conservative donors were growing less animated about the Clintons was the launch of Stop Her Now in February 2005. Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein planned on raising $10 million for a campaign along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the 2004 group that raised $27 million to attack John Kerry’s Vietnam service and his homeland antiwar activism.
Finkelstein failed. The group recorded a radio ad that was never broadcast and from its founding through June 2005, reported only one $500 donation. Over the next year, Clinton glided to her Senate re-election as the group raised only $25,000, and she out-raised her opponent by nearly ten to one.
[...]
What changed between 2000 and 2007? Why isn’t the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name the motivating factor it used to be for conservatives? Some activists argue that the GOP and the movement are distracted. In Rudy Giuliani, there’s a Republican frontrunner who defies decades of party stances on social issues and personal mores. Conservative donors are too busy sorting out the party’s future to cohere and battle Hillary.
“Back in 2000 we had a plan,” says Viguerie. “It was a simple plan: beat Hillary. Keep Hillary out of the Senate. And at first we had Rudy Giuliani as the focus of that, but after he dropped out, you could help out Rick Lazio. We’ll get a presidential candidate, and then we’ll get focused.”
That might be one reason the Right can’t rally against Hillary. Conservative division has led to depression, a sense that a Clinton restoration is inevitable, and that the best plan going ahead is to wait for her election and watch as, like her husband, she stumbles and seeds a GOP comeback.
A mid-July CBS News poll revealed that 53 percent of Republicans thought it was very or somewhat likely that Clinton would win the presidency. Few Republicans think the party can win back Congress in 2008. Combine that with the anger that between one-third and one-quarter of the GOP base feels toward George W. Bush, and the relentless negativity starts to make sense.
“There’s a big difference between 2000 and 2007,” says John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman from New York and the head of Stop Hillary PAC. “In 2000, everyone on the Right hated Clinton and Gore, and we rallied to the guy we didn’t know: Bush. It’s different now. We hate Bush, and we hate the Bushes. We hate watching the Clintons palling around with the Bushes on goodwill tours and the like.”
There is another reason conservatives can’t count on Hillary: she offends and irritates them so deeply that they have trouble actually strategizing against her. They launch attacks, but compared to the carefully plotted Swift Boat strike on John Kerry or the years-long effort to spotlight Al Gore’s strange bragging and fibbing, the anti-Hillary attacks are erratic, grabbing early media attention and then fading out of the picture. Conservatives fixate on long-dormant scandals, like Bill Clinton’s treatment of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, without appreciating that reporters no longer want to chase those stories and that their very mention stokes sympathy for Clinton’s wife.
But it’s all some anti-Hillary agitators know how to do. In July, Sean Hannity told professional Hillary slayer Dick Morris the question he wanted some intrepid hack to ask the candidate: “Do you believe the women that claim that your husband serially abused them? Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones. Is that a legitimate and fair question?” Morris repeatedly shook his head and tried to explain where Hannity was going wrong: “Whenever anybody hits Hillary on her personal life, her marriage, or whether she is a lesbian or not, it plays into her hands.”
Morris is right. Clinton has never been as popular as she was in 1998 and 1999, during the height of her husband’s sex scandals, when voters grew to see her as a courageous wronged woman. (New York Democrats recruited Clinton to run for their open Senate seat hoping to cash in on that popularity. She didn’t, as it’s sometimes remembered, “parachute” into the race.) She’s not completely immune from Republican attacks on her character, but she can deflect an awful lot of the damage. Most attacks on Hillary’s past, her ethics, or her scandals either backfire or fall off the radar.
Why is the media so disinterested? Simple: Hillary-phobia doesn’t sell like it used to. [...]
So she eggs along her opponents in an ongoing, losing effort. Nothing that conservatives can do to Hillary Clinton can fix the fractures in the movement or re-commit the voters who have abandoned them during the Bush era. Attacking Hillary is a short-term fix, a flawed strategy that Democrats tried only three years ago as they nominated a ticket with a muddled Iraq War position and tried to make up the difference with $300-million worth of third-party attacks. They never dealt with their internal crises, hoping that a campaign against Bush would be enough to win.
“I’d prefer these things be contests of ideas,” says Craig Shirley, a longtime political strategist who’s doing some work for Stop Her Now. “Our conservative, libertarian ideas are better than their collectivist ideas. But running on ideas, you know, that requires the people on our side to have the courage and intellect to understand what this is all about.”
That would require a little bit of cool-headedness and distance, and the Republican Party doesn’t have much of either at the moment. When I pressed John LeBoutillier on what the conservative movement needed to do, he fretted about the damage of the last seven years. “The Bush experience has really turned them off,” he said. “We’re so thrown that we don’t have our heads on straight.” But when I asked if his energy would be put to better use reforming the Republican Party, he hedged. Clinton had to be defeated first.
Obviously, 2008 is not going to lack for anti-Hillary campaigns. There will be more books, more speculation about scandals, more digging into financial records—a treasure hunt for some silver bullet that will finally end her career. This is exactly what the Clinton campaign is ready for, and they’re in luck: the swing vote that will elect the next president is far angrier at Republicans and George W. Bush than it is at her right now. It’s moved on. It wants to hear some new arguments.
The question for conservatives is whether they want to spend the next year making those arguments or whether they want to spend it spinning Hillary Clinton.
roxanne, _us economic strength.
check the Dollar Index, and reports of Chinese getting nervous and diversifying (more euros, proportionately).
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ai.WadiYZqBk&refer=home
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http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_10_22/cover.html
October 22, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
It Takes an Agenda
Conservatives cannot live by Hillary-hate alone.
by David Weigel
It’s a balmy, beer-drinking evening in the middle of August, and the conservatives trickling in to a meeting of the Robert A. Taft Club can’t enjoy it. They’re mostly under-30 Washington professionals, and they’re fed up with the Republican Party. They think George W. Bush’s bumbling and ideological hat-trading have reduced the conservative movement to a pitiable, piddling state. If Karl Rove stepped inside, he’d come out looking like Oscar de la Hoya after a bout gone wrong.
They settle into a debate about the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Panelists take turns whipping the party for its sins. “We beat them on immigration,” says Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer, “but right now, we just don’t have the strength or the resources to affect public policy the way we want to.” He beseeches the crowd to help save the movement, but that gets a muted reaction. So he steps it up: “I still think that in the short term, as many problems as we have right now, Hillary Clinton can bring conservatives back together.”
The name does the trick: soft laughter moves around the room. Keeping Hillary out of the White House is literally the only motivation some conservatives have to pull the Republican lever in 2008, especially if their party nominates a pro-choice candidate for the first time since 1976. “Just enough people might go to the polls next November nursing one conviction that trumps all others,” Terence Jeffrey wrote a few weeks after the panel (which he also appeared on). “There’s no way they would vote for Hillary Clinton.” Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard executive editor and a sturdy weathervane for Republican popular opinion, expressed the same thing in a late-September column: “Nearly all Republicans, plus a lot of independents, rally around the need to defeat Senator Hillary Clinton and keep her away from the presidency. So it follows, not entirely logically, that they wish for her to win the Democratic nomination.”
Is this wishful thinking from a party and a movement on the ropes? Not according to pollsters. There are voters who have given up on the GOP over the last few years and utterly loathe the Clintons in general or Hillary in particular. Americans are aching to vote Democratic, and polls that test a generic Republican candidate against a generic Democrat give Clinton’s party a double-digit lead. But their enthusiasm flags when they ponder the flesh-and-blood Democratic frontrunner. Pollster Scott Rasmussen points out that at least 45 percent of Americans don’t like Clinton personally. She simply rubs them the wrong way—in every way. Despite that generic lead, she only ties or narrowly outpaces Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain.
“Of the top three Democratic candidates, she’s absolutely the weakest in the general election,” Rasmussen says. “Hillary is a unifying factor for Republicans, and Republicans aren’t otherwise unified. If Hillary is the nominee, this is a competitive race.”
But see if you can spot the problem. Conservatives are fraught, angry at their traditional party, unable to decide on a standard-bearer, unsure even what they stand for. They don’t think this is the year to sort those problems out. [...]
On the Right, the list of grievances was even longer. Both Clintons were seen as ambassadors of 1960s radicalism and cultural decadence, and Hillary was the worse of the two: a pro-choice feminist who didn’t take her husband’s name until pollsters told her it would help him make a political comeback.
Yet for all of that outrage, Republicans lost that election to the Clintons. And the hope that voters will see what they see and reject what the Clintons stand for resembles the plan Democrats clung to in 2004. They choose John Kerry on the theory he would be the least controversial general-election candidate, then counted on an electorate fed up with George W. Bush to deliver the election.
In the nearly three years since, Hillary has been the de facto Democratic candidate. The Right’s efforts to attack her have fallen completely, pathetically flat. Her popularity is low, but not much lower than Bush’s was in 2004. If the linchpin of a 2008 campaign is unifying Republicans in the cause of defeating Hillary, it might be enough to stitch together most of the conservative movement—but not enough to win.
Compare the efforts of 2007 to the efforts of 1999 and 2000. After First Lady Hillary Clinton started seeking a Senate seat, Republican donors practically sprained their wrists signing checks. Rudy Giuliani, a social liberal whom Republicans weren’t as comfortable with then as now, raised more than $20 million. When Giuliani left the race, Rep. Rick Lazio raised $4.5 million in six weeks.
That wasn’t the limit of the Hillary effect. The National Republican Senatorial Committee saw its donations surge when it asked supporters to banish the Clintons from Washington once and for all. By the middle of 2000, the committee raised $20 million, twice as much as it had raised in 1998 and triple what it raised in 1996. “She’s now the Republican Party’s No. 1 fundraiser,” said a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee to a reporter from The Hill.
It was a simpler time. This past July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee sent out a “quiz” to donors that warned, “Hillary Clinton is calling Senate Democrats to push a passage of measures to institute government-run healthcare.” Imagine, a President Hillary Clinton with a massive Senate majority to do her bidding! But appeals like that have done nothing for the NRSC: their Democratic counterparts have out-raised them by $34.1 to $18.1 million. The month of the quiz letter, the Democrats beat them by $2.7 to $2.2 million.
It’s the same story in the presidential race. Since the start of the year, the nine remaining Republican candidates have raised about $104 million. The Democrats, including Clinton, have raised $144.3 million. When John McCain campaign manager Rick Davis sent out an 11th-hour fundraising e-mail, he played what he thought was his strongest card: “There are many reasons to support John McCain, but as we approach this quarter’s fundraising deadline Saturday at midnight, let me remind you of just one of them: John McCain is the only candidate who can defeat Hillary Clinton.” That was the prelude to a weak finance report and a staff purge that completed McCain’s descent to hobbled dark horse.
And those efforts have been absolute triumphs compared to the third-party anti-Hillary efforts and PACs. The first sign that conservative donors were growing less animated about the Clintons was the launch of Stop Her Now in February 2005. Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein planned on raising $10 million for a campaign along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the 2004 group that raised $27 million to attack John Kerry’s Vietnam service and his homeland antiwar activism.
Finkelstein failed. The group recorded a radio ad that was never broadcast and from its founding through June 2005, reported only one $500 donation. Over the next year, Clinton glided to her Senate re-election as the group raised only $25,000, and she out-raised her opponent by nearly ten to one.
[...]
What changed between 2000 and 2007? Why isn’t the mention of Hillary Clinton’s name the motivating factor it used to be for conservatives? Some activists argue that the GOP and the movement are distracted. In Rudy Giuliani, there’s a Republican frontrunner who defies decades of party stances on social issues and personal mores. Conservative donors are too busy sorting out the party’s future to cohere and battle Hillary.
“Back in 2000 we had a plan,” says Viguerie. “It was a simple plan: beat Hillary. Keep Hillary out of the Senate. And at first we had Rudy Giuliani as the focus of that, but after he dropped out, you could help out Rick Lazio. We’ll get a presidential candidate, and then we’ll get focused.”
That might be one reason the Right can’t rally against Hillary. Conservative division has led to depression, a sense that a Clinton restoration is inevitable, and that the best plan going ahead is to wait for her election and watch as, like her husband, she stumbles and seeds a GOP comeback.
A mid-July CBS News poll revealed that 53 percent of Republicans thought it was very or somewhat likely that Clinton would win the presidency. Few Republicans think the party can win back Congress in 2008. Combine that with the anger that between one-third and one-quarter of the GOP base feels toward George W. Bush, and the relentless negativity starts to make sense.
“There’s a big difference between 2000 and 2007,” says John LeBoutillier, a former Republican congressman from New York and the head of Stop Hillary PAC. “In 2000, everyone on the Right hated Clinton and Gore, and we rallied to the guy we didn’t know: Bush. It’s different now. We hate Bush, and we hate the Bushes. We hate watching the Clintons palling around with the Bushes on goodwill tours and the like.”
There is another reason conservatives can’t count on Hillary: she offends and irritates them so deeply that they have trouble actually strategizing against her. They launch attacks, but compared to the carefully plotted Swift Boat strike on John Kerry or the years-long effort to spotlight Al Gore’s strange bragging and fibbing, the anti-Hillary attacks are erratic, grabbing early media attention and then fading out of the picture. Conservatives fixate on long-dormant scandals, like Bill Clinton’s treatment of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, without appreciating that reporters no longer want to chase those stories and that their very mention stokes sympathy for Clinton’s wife.
But it’s all some anti-Hillary agitators know how to do. In July, Sean Hannity told professional Hillary slayer Dick Morris the question he wanted some intrepid hack to ask the candidate: “Do you believe the women that claim that your husband serially abused them? Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Paula Jones. Is that a legitimate and fair question?” Morris repeatedly shook his head and tried to explain where Hannity was going wrong: “Whenever anybody hits Hillary on her personal life, her marriage, or whether she is a lesbian or not, it plays into her hands.”
Morris is right. Clinton has never been as popular as she was in 1998 and 1999, during the height of her husband’s sex scandals, when voters grew to see her as a courageous wronged woman. (New York Democrats recruited Clinton to run for their open Senate seat hoping to cash in on that popularity. She didn’t, as it’s sometimes remembered, “parachute” into the race.) She’s not completely immune from Republican attacks on her character, but she can deflect an awful lot of the damage. Most attacks on Hillary’s past, her ethics, or her scandals either backfire or fall off the radar.
Why is the media so disinterested? Simple: Hillary-phobia doesn’t sell like it used to. [...]
So she eggs along her opponents in an ongoing, losing effort. Nothing that conservatives can do to Hillary Clinton can fix the fractures in the movement or re-commit the voters who have abandoned them during the Bush era. Attacking Hillary is a short-term fix, a flawed strategy that Democrats tried only three years ago as they nominated a ticket with a muddled Iraq War position and tried to make up the difference with $300-million worth of third-party attacks. They never dealt with their internal crises, hoping that a campaign against Bush would be enough to win.
“I’d prefer these things be contests of ideas,” says Craig Shirley, a longtime political strategist who’s doing some work for Stop Her Now. “Our conservative, libertarian ideas are better than their collectivist ideas. But running on ideas, you know, that requires the people on our side to have the courage and intellect to understand what this is all about.”
That would require a little bit of cool-headedness and distance, and the Republican Party doesn’t have much of either at the moment. When I pressed John LeBoutillier on what the conservative movement needed to do, he fretted about the damage of the last seven years. “The Bush experience has really turned them off,” he said. “We’re so thrown that we don’t have our heads on straight.” But when I asked if his energy would be put to better use reforming the Republican Party, he hedged. Clinton had to be defeated first.
Obviously, 2008 is not going to lack for anti-Hillary campaigns. There will be more books, more speculation about scandals, more digging into financial records—a treasure hunt for some silver bullet that will finally end her career. This is exactly what the Clinton campaign is ready for, and they’re in luck: the swing vote that will elect the next president is far angrier at Republicans and George W. Bush than it is at her right now. It’s moved on. It wants to hear some new arguments.
The question for conservatives is whether they want to spend the next year making those arguments or whether they want to spend it spinning Hillary Clinton.
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