Stop Hillary!

Drudge has a link to a story about how Hillary Clinton apparently won a South Carolina Straw Poll.
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/11905946.htm

In typical Drudge fashion he therefore proclaims her to be the frontrunner for '08. (Sidenote: I wonder how many small donations the RNC will get today? Way to carry water for your masters, Matt!)

While the title of this post is "Stop Hillary!", I really hope to examine the pros and cons of a Hillary for President campaign. Reece, I am looking your way to contribute more as you are signficantly smarter than I am.

Before we begin, I want to explain why I titled the post the way I did. It is not because the fix is in against a Hillary candidacy, but because while being able to objectively discuss the pros and cons of Hillary Clinton as a potential Democratic nominee, she will NEVER have my vote for one simple reason: She reminds me of someone from high school. Uncharacteristically, I am not going to name names, but I will provide a description. Back in the ol' high school, I had a friend who dated this girl who every time I look at Hillary Clinton I cannot stop thinking about. This isn't some long lost love crush. This friend's girlfriend was quite possibly the most annoying woman on the face of the earth. For one, she couldn't curse. I mean she tried to curse, but she couldn't. You know, one of those "oh (thinking space should I say "poo" or "rats", alright I will say it) shit!" type of people. It was disingenuous. It was fake. The girl wasn't true to her upbringing. Her parents were conservative christians who raised their daughter to be an upper middle class suburban housewife, and she was trying ever so hard to be anything but an upper middle class suburban housewife. Watching her though, you could tell she was straining to be something close to what she thought other people would consider "hip". No High school Hillary, be yourself, be genuine. Hillary Clinton is the same way. Look at Reece's previous post regarding her interview on CNN as evidence of this similar behavior. That is the reason Hillary will never have my vote, in a primary or general election. (who am I kidding, I will vote a straight Democratic ticket, like I have every year since 1998)

Moving on.
Let us start with the Pros about a Hillary candidacy.

1) Her negatives may already be maxed.
Folks can't hate her more. Most of those folks wouldn't vote for a Democrat anyway. To some extent this makes her impervious to attacks. Of course, the Republicans will still find a way to attack her, and those of us on the left will need to be ready to deflect those attacks and respond in kind.

2) Incorporated in point 1) is that we already know most of what we need to know about Hillary Clinton. Everyone knows who she is, what she stands for, and where she is coming from. This is a pro because there is no need to waste precious campaign resources on "introducing the candidate" to the people. We just need to find a ways to get the American people to spend their political "money", or their vote, on our candidate. However, there is a pitfall here, any attempt to redefine Hillary is going to make her look disengenuous. That will open up a huge soft spot for republican attack.

3) Knowing what we do about Hillary, she comes off as tough and as a fighter. In the context of the idiotic "war on terror" (idiotic because you cannot have a war on a tactic) the Democrats need to nominate a fighter, someone the American people will trust to "defend the nation" While I personally would rather attack the entire idea of the "war on terror", I don't think it will be an easy sell, so we do what we can with what we have to work with. Hillary comes off as tough and a fighter, and that appears to make it easier to sell the idea of a woman president defending the nation to the american people.

4) this space reserved for future thoughts.

Let us now turn to the negatives

1) Hillary ain't Bill. Hillary doesn't connect with the american people like Bill, she is not from Arkansas, she doesn't have his manner of speaking, she doesn't look natural eating barbeque, she doesn't connect with those in the center-left/center/center-right the same way Bill did. She doesn't come off like a good ol' boy, never meaning no harm, been in trouble with the law since the day she was born. In fact, Hillary comes off to a lot of people exactly like the upper middle class suburban housewife archetype that she undoubtedly was raised to be in the North Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois.

2) She's a senator. I am sorry but I am sick of Senators getting big heads thinking they should run for president. 2004 showed us the essence of why legislators should not run for President straight from the legislature. Namely, Did she vote for it before she voted against it? or is it the other way around. The legislative process is too arcane for most americans to understand, and the process presents situations in which Legislators are forced to make votes that can be used to define who they are, and what kind of president that legislator will be. The arcane nature of the legislative process allows a candidate to get pasted as anti-defense because of a vote in which the candidate votes against a defense spending bill because of a "poison pill", but then votes for the defense spending later in another bill without such "poison pill". Sure one might argue that it is only necessary to make political arguments against such attacks, but guess what happens then! You are bogged down in the minutiae of the legislative process and open to the charge that you lack a "vision" for the country. Either way, bad idea to nominate a Senator.

3) I am sure I have another negative, but this post is huge, so I will come back to it. I need to get some lunch and get to work.