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Tag: electability
A Democrat That Can Win Is What We Need

A Democrat That Can Win Is What We Need

In my estimation, there’s only one presidential candidate in 2016 fully capable of doing the job, and she’s anything but a natural.

As Hillary Clinton has also been the target of maybe the longest-running smear campaign in American history — including roughly a dozen partisan Congressional investigations and a six-year leak-o-matic “independent counsel” probe led by the fastidious Kenneth Starr — it’s no wonder some voters mistrust her.

Overcoming that suspicion is her biggest challenge.

Republicans have predicted her imminent indictment for 20 years. You’d think by now they’d have made something stick, if there was anything to it. But it didn’t happen then, and it’s not going to happen now for an obvious reason: in a democracy, political show trials endanger the prosecution as much as the defense.

Anybody who watched Hillary’s one-woman demolition of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s vaunted Benghazi committee should understand that.

Meanwhile, one of the best things about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign is his unwillingness to smear his opponent. Too bad many of his most passionate supporters aren’t so fastidious. With Iowa’s make-or-break moment approaching for Sanders, it’s getting nasty out there.

It’s not so much the tiresome attacks on anybody who disagrees with them as a corrupt sellout. (My corporate overlords, of course, dictated that sentence.) It’s the seeming belief that people can be browbeaten into supporting their guy.

Some are a bit like Trump supporters–although normally without the threats. That too may be changing. Recently a guy visited my Facebook page saying people like me deserve “to be dragged into the street and SHOT for…treason against not only our country and our people, but the ENTIRE [BLEEPING] WORLD.”

My response — “Settle down, Beavis” — sent him into a rage.

But no, Hillary’s not an instinctive performer, although her stage presence strikes me as improved since 2008. A person needn’t be “inauthentic” (pundit-speak for “bitch”) to be uncomfortable in front of an audience.

As for authenticity, few Democrats could work a crowd like North Carolina Sen. John Edwards.

President Obama nailed it during a recent Politico interview:

Hillary does better with “small groups” than big ones, he observed, before putting his thumb heavily on the scale. He described Hillary as a fighter, who’s “extraordinarily experienced — and, you know, wicked smart and knows every policy inside and out — [and] sometimes [that] could make her more cautious, and her campaign more prose than poetry,” he said.

Even so, she came closer to defeating Obama in 2008 than Republicans have. “Had things gone a little bit different in some states or if the sequence of primaries and caucuses been a little different,” the president said, “she could have easily won.”

Indeed. As non-endorsements go, the president’s remarks couldn’t have been more complimentary. “She had to do everything that I had to do, except, like Ginger Rogers, backwards in heels,” he added.

Obama wisely said nothing critical about Bernie Sanders, but nothing particularly warm either. “Bernie came in with the luxury of being a complete long shot and just letting loose,” he observed. The president said he understood the appeal of Sanders “full-throated…progressivism.”

Well, Mr. Hopey-Changey as Sarah Palin calls him, certainly should.

Seven years of trench warfare with congressional Republicans, however, have brought out the president’s inner pragmatist. Which Democrat is best-positioned to consolidate the Obama legacy and move it forward?

First, one who stands a good chance of being elected.

Look, there’s a reason Karl Rove’s super PAC is running anti-Hillary TV ads in Iowa. Bernie Sanders “radical” past makes him a GOP oppo-research dream. Never mind socialism. Did you know he once wrote a column claiming that sexual frustration causes cervical cancer?

That in the 1970s, he called for nationalizing oil companies, electric utilities, and — get this — TV networks? Asked about it, he deflects by noting that Hillary once supported Barry Goldwater. Yeah, when she was 16. Bernie was in his mid-30s when he called for confiscating the Rockefeller family fortune. How most Americans hear that is: if he can take away their stuff, he can take away mine.

Sure, many people went off the rails during the Seventies. Most aren’t running for president. Bernie strikes me as a fine senator and a decent man. However, the current U.S. Congress has voted 60 times to repeal Obamacare. And he’s going to give us single-payer “Medicare for all?”

No, he’s not. Assuming he could find a sponsor, it’d never get out of committee. I doubt I’ll live to see single-payer health insurance in the USA. And I’m younger than Bernie. A complete retrofitting of American health care simply isn’t in the works. The votes just aren’t there, and they won’t materialize by repeating the magic word “revolution.”

President Obama says Hillary represents the “recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.”

Hard-won reality, that is, as opposed to fantasy.

Photo: Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton (L) and Bernie Sanders (R) smile at the crowd following the First in the South Presidential Candidates Forum held at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, South Carolina November 6, 2015. REUTERS/Chris Keane

Paul Ryan Candidacy As GOP Suicide Pact

Voters in New York’s 26th congressional district are far more Republican than the state as a whole, but they elected a Democrat, Kathy Hochul, this May when she ran a campaign based primarily on a pledge to protect Medicare from the cuts outlined in the GOP budget that had sailed through the House of Representatives earlier in the spring. So why do Republicans increasingly see the author of that budget – Serious Ideas Man Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan — as their savior in the 2012 presidential election?

Paul has been getting buzz across the conservative blogosphere and the mainstream media this week as he is reportedly mulling a run. Young, energetic, and more willing than most to put GOP rhetoric onto paper in the form of real policy proposals — proposals that tend to upset the elderly and everyone else who likes Social Security and Medicare — Ryan strikes many as the conservative with his head on his shoulders (read: not Rick Perry) the movement needs.

And to be sure, Perry’s bomb-throwing makes Ryan seem moderate and sensible. He’s been urged on by Jeb Bush, and perhaps that shouldn’t surprise. The same Bushies who already disliked Perry for personal, Texas reasons are tied in to the business community that isn’t comfortable with someone referring to the Federal Reserve chairman as “treasonous.”

So Ryan may strike many as the more civil conservative to run against Obama.

But he is intimately connected to a budget and Medicare privatization scheme that so upsets voters that they defy their partisan tendencies to register outrage. Do Republicans really want this man at the top of the ballot next fall? His campaign might look more like Barry Goldwater’s — a disaster that satiated the conservative movement — than Ronald Reagan’s.

Perry Has Some ‘Splainin To Do

Rick Perry, the Texas governor who the far right is desperately hoping will jump into the presidential race to give voice to the Intelligent Design and The Right to Choose Is the Greatest Threat To Mankind crowd, is getting some flak from fellow social conservative and 2008 contender Mike Huckabee:

In an email sent to his list of past and present supporters, Huckabee intones:

Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, is still flirting with a run, and it’s the type of flirting even his wife approves of. The Dallas Morning News reports that a campaign button collector ordered a “Perry for Governor 2010” button from Perry’s office. What he got back was a button, all pressed and ready to go, that reads, “Perry – President – 2012.” So if Perry’s not running, then that button will be a REAL collector’s item. For all his new found commitment to hyper-conservatism, he’ll get to explain why he supported pro-abortion, pro-same sex marriage Rudy Guiliani last time.

Perhaps he’s bitter, as Maggie Haberman at Politico notes Huckabee sought Perry’s nod last time around only to get the electability argument shoved in his face:

“I love Mike,” Perry told an Iowa crowd in 2007. “I mean, he’s like a brother. I just don’t think he can win and I shared that with him. And [Huckabee] asked me to be his national chairman about six months ago and I told him, I said, ’Man, I love you like a brother, but just let me slide here.’ It was a hard conversation to call and tell him I was for Rudy. He was disappointed and a bit frustrated. I still love him and he loves me.”

Why Perry thinks he’s more electable than Huckabee, who was far more moderate in his tone and demeanor and earned respect from liberal pundits for his reasonable stances on issues like providing in-state tuition rates to children of illegal immigrants, is not discernible.