Scanning the titles of blog posts over the past few weeks, I’ve seen a number of people touting Hillary Clinton for one reason or another. It always seems to boil down to “strategery”–some sort of calculus that states, no matter what we think of her personally, HRC is the Dem who can win. For the most part, I stay out of those discussion. Once you’ve said “No way, no how am I ever going to support her!”, and ticked off the reasons, what is there to say?
But the bottom line is this–no matter how well Hillary does in debates, or how “electable” she is deemed to be, I can’t overlook this unsightly growth she has attached to her candidacy. Not even if she does a complete turnaround and actually apologizes for her Iraq vote. That would be nice, but if she doesn’t have that thing removed, it would be for naught.
“That thing” is James Carville. A trip via the wayback machine to November 2006 reminds us…
Carville Says Dems Should Dump Dean over “Rumsfeldian” Incompetence
What James Carville refuses to “get”, no matter how hard we might try to (proverbially) shake him, is that this isn’t about Howard Dean, no matter what he might think of Howard as a person. Attack Howard, and you attack all of those who supported him for DNC Chair. Whether or not they liked Howard personally, a lot of Democrats agreed with the 50-state strategy he promised. And they agree with him when he said things like this about the effect the internet has had on politics
It is an extraordinary evolution. An extraordinary evolution. Essentially it means that politicians have to acknowledge something that’s been true for a long time. Which is, power is loaned to us–we don’t own the power, and we need to earn the power every two years.
Does James Carville believe that? I doubt it. I imagine he must live in fear of the day that the majority of Americans actually start to think that way.