Hillary Clinton is running for President:
(My commentary on the declaration of her candidacy is below the fold)
Six years after making history by winning a United States Senate seat as first lady, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton announced this morning that she was taking the first formal step to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, a journey that would break yet more political barriers in her extraordinary and controversial career.
“I’m in,” she says in a statement on her new campaign Web site. “And I’m in to win.”
Mrs. Clinton, 59, called for “bold but practical changes” in foreign, domestic, and national security policy and said that she would focus on finding “a right end” to the Iraq war, expanding health insurance, pursuing greater energy independence and strengthening Social Security and Medicare.
Good for her. However, she’s going to have to explain what her “bold but practical changes” mean other than as a catchy slogan or sound bite. And what the hell is “a right end” to the Iraq war? That’s just fence straddling hoo-hah as far as I’m concerned. It can mean anything anyone imagines it means.
Hillary Clinton is my Senator, and frankly I can’t point to a lot that she has done to help the State of New York or the country in the time she has been in the Senate. Holding that office has always been merely a stepping stone to this moment, when she could announce she was running for President and use her well known name and her political power as a member of the Senate to advance her candidacy. She has been the quintessential “triangulator” in office, never out in front on any issue, never one to lead the way in pushing any part of the progressive agenda, not even her original pet issue of health care.
She has a lot to do to earn my vote. Like Barack Obama, she sells papers, so we will hear a great deal about her in the media. But, as with Obama, we won’t hear much about where she stands, what she would really do if she became President, unless the statement in question has been pre-vetted and deemed “safe” by her entourage of consultants and DLC cronies.
I know where John Edwards and Wes Clark stand on the War and on other issues. I even know where Obama stands on the war (it’s the one issue where he has clearly allied himself with the progressive movement in the Democratic Party). I have no clue what Hillary would do, however. Her corporate connections run deep, though you will see scant coverage of them by the major media outlets.
In 2000, there was a candidate who mouthed platitudes, enjoyed favorable media coverage of his campaign and who had many, many connections to prominent corporations and their executives. A man who claimed he was one thing when he was really something completely different. That candidate was George W. Bush.
I’d like to think that Hillary would advance progressive causes should she ever be elected President. I’d like to believe that, but I won’t. Not now. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. Right now, count me among those who will oppose her nomination as the Democratic candidate for president in 2008.
