Dave Weigel, writing in The American Conservative, on the pathetic state of GOP anti-Hillary freak-outery:
Nothing that conservatives can do to Hillary Clinton can fix the fractures in the movement or re-commit the voters who have abandoned them during the Bush era. Attacking Hillary is a short-term fix, a flawed strategy that Democrats tried only three years ago as they nominated a ticket with a muddled Iraq War position and tried to make up the difference with $300-million worth of third-party attacks. They never dealt with their internal crises, hoping that a campaign against Bush would be enough to win.
[snip]
Obviously, 2008 is not going to lack for anti-Hillary campaigns. There will be more books, more speculation about scandals, more digging into financial records—a treasure hunt for some silver bullet that will finally end her career. This is exactly what the Clinton campaign is ready for, and they’re in luck: the swing vote that will elect the next president is far angrier at Republicans and George W. Bush than it is at her right now. It’s moved on. It wants to hear some new arguments.The question for conservatives is whether they want to spend the next year making those arguments or whether they want to spend it spinning Hillary Clinton.
Do Republicans have new arguments? I hadn't noticed.
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While I might quibble with some of his build-up, I believe that Simon has the exact point to be made: politics is about a beauty contest, being the most attractive (or least ugly) in the eyes of the beholder. Ideas and policies become the tool of propagandists. Rational debate has left the building.
It's a little early to declare The Hildebeeste a winner.
And it's a little early to declare that the Pubbies do not have a viable platform--it has yet to be fashioned around whoever the nominee will be.
But in the meantime, it's useful to review the mountain (or two, or three) of dirt she has hidden under those pantsuits.
Irenaeus:
From a crassly political perspective, African-Americans only gave Jindal 1 in 10 of their votes -- which under past models of Louisiana politics would have forced him into a run-off.
But the combination of the African-American post-Katrina diaspora from New Orleans, low turn-out among African-Americans elsewhere in the state, and split opposition, helped give Jindal his victory outright.
(That, and I hasten to add even as a liberal, a positive message and one projecting competence in the sad wake of Gov. Blanco's incompetence with Katrina.)
Irenaeus et al. Confusing Louisiana with the rest of the country speaks ill of either your analytical skills or your estimate of the country as a whole. There is no way you can scale up the Jindal victory to support the idea of a resurgent Republican Party, whether such a resurgence is even possible or not.
Uh, Simon, Bill & Hillary built their "grand political family" from scratch just 20 years ago. The Bush political family has been around since W's great-grandfather (Prescott's father). Sorry, there's no big family money in Bill & Hillary - what, if they've put together $20-30 million through speaking/books by now? W's father was a mainstay of the Carlyle group, W was funded through various tricky buyouts and plum unearned positions.
Sorry if people who earned their positions run into people who bought theirs and proved inept. Kick out those who earned theirs and did a good job just to keep from being "third world"? Republicans love you, I'm sure.
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