|
|
| |
| Fri, Dec. 5, 2008 |  |
 |
|
||
| |
Anti-war versus pro-Hillary Thursday, Nov 24, 2005 By John Brummett County government executives from around the country were meeting at the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. My assignment via the invitation of Pulaski County Judge Buddy Villines was to take 15 minutes and see if I could fill it by telling them everything I knew. Actually, it was to provide an off-off-Beltway assessment of the political climate. I declared the race for the Democratic presidential nomination over. I gave it to Hillary Clinton, owing to the factors that decide party presidential nominations: celebrity, money and good will in the base. One of the county executives begged not so much to differ as challenge. He wondered if the emboldening anti-war fervor in the Democratic Party base was becoming so strong that Hillary would find herself rejected in the primaries over her vote in favor of the invasion of Iraq and her cautious, moderate and tempered comments since. He wondered if, at the least, she might need to change her position on Iraq to join the growing and ever-louder anti-war chorus. It was a fine question, the caliber you'd rather expect from a county government executive. I declared my respect for its underlying reasoning, then pretty much pooh-poohed it: Hillary's celebrity will overpower all other Democratic primary factors, including the war, and the last Democratic presidential candidate to change his war position for supposed political convenience spent most of the general election campaign defending himself for having voted on both sides. There always exists the possibility that I was wrong. You have Cindy Sheehan posting a statement on Michael Moore's Web site about her meeting with Hillary on the war. Sheehan writes that she found the New York senator's statement that she didn't want our slain troops to have died in vain to be positively Limbaugh-esque, straight out of a Republican talking-points manual. Sheehan wrote that she'd never vote for Hillary for president. Now you have a cover article in the New Republic invoking U.S. Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin as the Howard Dean of 2008, meaning the fervent anti-war candidate. The piece anoints Feingold as a possible "Hillary slayer," suggesting he could erode her vital liberal base. These indeed are intriguing developments, though I remain for now unpersuaded for three reasons: 1. Howard Dean didn't win. He imploded for nonwar reasons. Democrats made what they thought was a more pragmatic choice. 2. Feingold is admirably independent-minded, but a presidential nominating base is stubbornly demanding and unforgiving of the sin of thinking outside that base. Yes, Hillary voted wrong on the war. But Feingold voted to confirm John Roberts while Hillary didn't. And Feingold was the lone Democrat in the Senate to vote against U.S. Sen. Robert Byrd's resolution to dismiss the impeachment case against Hillary's husband before hearing it. Candidates like Feingold tend to get good press, then go the way of Bruce Babbitt and Paul Tsongas. The best man, or woman, seldom wins a presidential primary. The best politician wins. 3. In that context, the last person to win both a Democratic presidential nomination and a presidential race was someone Hillary knows well and is ideally positioned to emulate. Her husband managed to straddle the left and center. If you have enough political talent and celebrity and money, you can occasionally - rarely, but occasionally - offend those in your base and make them like it, sending a favorable message to the center in the process. Counter-scheduling, they call it. Hillary is the only Democrat positioned even to attempt that. ------- John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699. |
