This is what happens when you only listen to people like James ‘Matalin’ Carville, Paul Begala, and Donna Brazille. You piss off the base of the Democratic Party. Poor Hillary.
…antiwar anger has festered, and yesterday morning Mrs. Clinton rolled out a new response to those demanding contrition: She said she was willing to lose support from voters rather make an apology she did not believe in.
“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast that vote or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to chose from,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience in Dover, N.H., a veiled reference to two rivals for the nomination, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina.
Her decision not to apologize is regarded so seriously within her campaign that some advisers believe it will be remembered as a turning point in the race: either ultimately galvanizing voters against her (if she loses the nomination), or highlighting her resolve and her willingness to buck Democratic conventional wisdom (if she wins).
At the same time, the level of Democratic anger has surprised some of her allies and advisers, and her campaign is worried about how long it will last and how much damage it might cause her.
Apparently, Carville-Matalin have advised her that it is worse to be seen as a flip-flopper than to make virtually every anti-war activist into a personal enemy. And it isn’t strictly anti-war democrats she has alienated, but the entire Howard Dean campaign from 2004 and anyone that has worked on the ground on Dean’s 50 State Strategy. Here’s a modified transcript of scottinamerica’s recent conversation with Paul Begala.
scottforamerica:I hope you will support the 50-state strategy.
Begala: That depends what you mean by 50 state strategy.
scottforamerica: I mean the plan for Democrats to compete everywhere and for every office in the country.
Begala: That I don’t support. We should start with principles and values. Sure, we should compete everywhere, but that’s not the right strategy. After working for over 30 campaigns this cycle, not a single one of those campaigns was helped by the 50-state strategy. Name examples where the 50-state strategy helped us win in 2006.
scottforamerica: Kentucky and Indiana, along with progress in Nebraska and Kansas.
Begala: Look, when we started there were only about 15 competitive races, but Rahm made the field over 35 by the end and that had nothing to do with the 50-state strategy.
scottforamerica: We never would have had so many competitive districts if not for the DNC investing staffers and resources into those states early on and expanding the playing field.
Begala: So you have people out there, what are they doing there though?
scottforamerica: the’re building a long term infrastructure for the Democratic Party, and we had people all over America knocking on doors and spreading the Democratic message.
Begala: So what do they say when they knock on the doors then?
scottforamerica: They had a succinct 6 point plan for a “new direction” that they were discussing, a cohesive message that we haven’t had in the past.
Begala: Anyway, I don’t need some a**hole from Vermont telling me what to do.
That pretty much sums up how the Hillary campaign sees the party activists. Their entire worldview has been preserved in amber since January 19th, 2001. They’ve shown no vision. They’ve shown no leadership. They are ‘surprised’ at the level of anger people have over Hillary’s vote on the war? Maybe they should have had Peter Daou read them any one of a hundred diaries at Daily Kos that appear each day.
“She is in a box now on her Iraq vote, but she doesn’t want to be in a different, even worse box — the vacillating, flip-flopping Democratic candidate that went to defeat in 2000 and ’04,” said one adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “She wants to maintain a firmness, and I think a lot of people around her hope she maintains a firmness. That’s what people will want in 2008.”…
…She has argued to associates in private discussions that Mr. Gore and Mr. Kerry lost, in part, because they could not convince enough Americans that they were resolute on national security, the associates said.
Keep up with the Maggie Thatcher crap…don’t go all wobbly on us, Hillary. Actually…she’s right. It’s way too late. We’ve been watching her team piss all down our backs for years now and we don’t believe it’s raining. We won’t believe it’s sunny if she suddenly stops having them piss all over us. She should call for a draft and seven more divisions for Iraq. Then we’d know how resolute she is.
She and her people are surprised by our anger? She’s either stupid or lying.
They may not be aware of how deep, how pervasive and how long lasting the anger at team Clinton’s support for the war and distain for the grassroots is. They are about to find out.
Hillary is in a deep box, yes she’s. When David Brooks comes to her defense..on her war vote – heard on NPR Friday All Things Considered, it confirms it’s not raining. It’s piss running down our backs.
The Democratic Party will not reach full potential until cleansed of the likes of Carville, Begala, Emanuel, Lieberman and yes Hillary too who ditched principles to become a puppet of the elite with her feet straddling both sides of the fence.
There’s a kind of parallel between the Hillary bunch and the Bushie bunch, I think. Hillary’s crowd is headed by long-time consultants and party operatives who look to Hubby Bill’s reign as the model for both campaigning and governing. Bush’s cronies and appointees are mostly retreads from the Reagan and daddy Bush days, modeling their hopes on an even more mythical era of Good Times. Both camps share with salesmen and religious fanatics the belief that you stick with the old formula, the old nostrums, and just keep applying them in order to bring back the happy days of influence and power.
They don’t adapt, they don’t read the cultural tides. They reduce the complexities of personality, timing, coincidence, and cultural mystery to simple recipes. Sometimes that works for a while, especially when your audience is a nation of people who don’t much like to think or imagine. It may work long enough to put Hillary in the White House.
What would be so wrong with that? She’d without doubt be many times better than the current occupant. But so would almost anybody. Thing is, Bush has, if nothing else, set the stage where deep questioning of some very basic questions about the American system can now be asked, and real change just might have a chance. Hillary as president would blow that chance, opting instead to push for the band-aid instead of the risky operation to remove the cancer. Like Hubby, she will co-opt genuine questioning and necessary progress with bland conciliatory gestures and symbolism. She’ll be OK when what we need is Great. I think somebody like Edwards or Obama, maybe Dodd or Vilsack, even, could rise to those heights. I can’t imagine that Hillary ever could or would.
That image of Hillary’s “golden shower” raining down on me was not a pleasant one to contemplate, Boo.
Yeah, and I don’t need some asshole like Paul Begala telling me what to do, so I guess we’re even.
While I’m at it, I’m still pissed about Dr. Dean being conspicuously absent from all the post election crowing by Rahm & Co. If we’re setting up for another “hold-yer-nose-and-vote” candidate in 2008, I believe I’ll go ahead and puke now. The DLC and their friends can take their triangulation and shove it where the sun don’t shine!!!
Bill Clinton was a BIG disappointment to me– here’s a guy, a product of the liberal, anti-Vietnam police action, pot smoking, bust down the establishment 1960’s gates– who basically sold out in order to become POTUS.
the war machine kept grinding right along under Clinton, the now all but forgotten drug war in Columbia, and Clinton/Gore gave big corporate donors everything they wanted, including NAFTA which we can now see is a total, pathetic joke– particularly for the lower and middle classes here.
this was the environmental administration? please, three poor high school kids in Philadelphia recently built a sports car that runs on vegetable oil. Gore’s “super car”? sitting in museum in Detroit gathering dust.
“sorry” this is not the democratic party anymore– it’s repuglican lite– a weak and stupid “strategy” brought forth by Carville, McAuliffe, Emanuel, etc., which got Clinton two elections and that’s it.
if these same corporate and pentagon ass-kissers are running HRC’s campaign– forget it, I’m not interested.
Hillary’s campaign doesn’t quite understand that they don’t, by default, get the commitment of the party base. They think that just because they might win the nomination that they’ll get all of the Democratic Party activists to come out full force like they’ve done in 2002, 2004, and 2006.
They miscalculate. They provide no reason for why the activists should piss away time and money to support her. In fact, they spit at the activists and then demand devotion as their due. Unlike the brain dead activists in the Publican Party, progressives know all too well when they’re being lied to. Hillary should wake up before the train leaves the station with her on the platform.
The train left her at the station a long time ago. Why is Hillary a leading candidate again? What exactly has she said or done to rouse our admiration and create a fervent hope to see her in office as chief exec? Admittedly this is the view of a jaded NY-er, but imo as a senator she has mainly been a waste of space, offering the occasional gust of hot air in warm weather.
To be fair, it would require misjudgment and ill-luck bordering on the supernatural for virtually any democratic candidate to collect a team of equally hopeless incompetents, blind party-liners, pathological liars, paranoiacs, hollow-souled Pecksniffian hypocrites, and greed-driven, shamelessly corrupt robber-barons before s/he could threaten us with a re-run of the GWB regime.
If Hillary’s team manages to paraphrase all of the above and fit a legible version onto a 3″ campaign button–and if somehow she ended up as our nominee–I suppose I might feel compelled to vote for her.
I can’t see the difference when I see the words C-L-I-N-T-O-N and B-U-S-H.
Hillary’s constant swaying with the moods in her rhetoric and underlying Rethug-lite DLC Globalist/Imperialist agenda is highly dishonest and ultimately destructive to the people not only of this nation, but of the other 193 nations of the globe the US affects.
Dump Hillary.
I’m just a regular Democratic kind of person and I want a winner. I don’t see Hillary winning the general election. She may get the nomination but most people don’t think she can become President. I want a winner this time. I don’t see Obama Barack winning this either. Both of them are stars but have limited experience. This is a very critical election for the country. We will have just managed to survive the worst Presidency in our history. We need an FDR. I’ll take an Elliot Spitzer over either of them.