I think you sum it up perfectly. The problems that PBO’s presidency faced, she’ll face as well. So for her to stand there and say, she would have odne X, Y or Z differently isn’t going to get a lot of traction. ESPECIALLY with a Repub dominated MSM. They will force her to run the gauntlet even with a Repub candidate that’s a cartoon.
Also, she’s not going to be able to speak to different sections of the electorate with a coherent message. She’ll be able to get the ones she referred to as “honest White working voters” but at the expense of the modern Dem base. I genuinely don’t think she can thread that needle.
Gore won. But I see your point. Obama is a bulwark against the damage that the GOP crazies can do. Even a hawkish Hillary can still fill that roll however, just because she isn’t GOP and she’s generally seen as trustworthy.
Well hopefully she DOESNT take TPMs suggestion and instead uses the successes of t he Obama presidency as a stepping stone to a brighter future. But then again the dems suck @ messaging so anythings possible.
My point is not that Penn is coming back, it is the Clintons hired him in the first place. Just why did somebody in the deep inner circle of Team Clinton find him attractive in the first place? Maybe he reflects her views.
Um, why would she want to do that? The will vote for whomever. She’ll need to get 50+% of all the idiot swing voters to win. Whether you want to characterize these as “Obama voters” is another matter.
What, exactly, does she stand for? What’s her stance on voter ID laws? How about gun control? Mass incarceration? Income inequality? The only reason I’m still a registered Democrat is because of President Obama. The Democrats, including Hillary, are unrecognizable. The only group they’re concerned about is the white working class, as though the rest of us don’t pay taxes and work multiple jobs.
Clinton should embrace Obama’s legacy and enrich it with her own vision, rather than reject his (substantial) achievements. The midterms have shown what happens when Democrats reject their leader and his policies and instead run on… absolutely nothing. It really is the dumbest strategy Clinton could choose. That mr. Scott fails to acknowledge this is a bit disappointing.
I think that having an excellent shot against a terrifying GOP field of candidates, as well as being the first woman to (presumably) winning a major party’s nomination will be worth one or two points in the popular vote, no?
Hillary needs to run on her own policies and her own rhetoric. If she relies too heavily on these pundits claiming to know how approval ratings affect her possibility of success, then she will simply fail. I still remember Gore’s flirtation with the “no brown suit” analysis by some campaign idiot. Stay yourself, Hillary, and tune out these idiots.
Gore (with some complicity from the Clintons) already blew an election, and subsequently an entire generation, by doing basically this. Bill Clinton probably made up for whatever failings he had in 2000 and 2008 by campaigning his ass off for Obama in 2012, though.
Actually, what unites nearly all of the Democrats is that they were unknown to the general public, but among people who follow politics, they were very much noticed 2-4 years before they ran and a lot of people said “this guy is going to be President”. That’s certainly true for Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, and Obama (the latter two drawing attention for their convention speeches that upstaged the candidates), and to a lesser extent McGovern and Stevenson as well.
As long as she doesn’t bash Obama she won’t have a problem with the base, when you look at the numbers, the Obama presidency has been a great success, it’s just that we were digging ourselves out of a huge ditch the GOP dug, it took 6 years to get near the top.
She’s going to have two problems:
Primaries, she’s going to have a hard time with her very pro-military stance, though I suspect that was to appear “tough” more than anything else and
Young people who have largely abandoned Obama, though I suspect that’s because they’re not paying attention.
This is a new electorate. Republicans are unlikely to vote for a Dem, the GOP has learned how to manipulate them well, and the base responds. Dems are not going to be excited by a Republican-lite. The only way she wins is by driving the base to the polls with deep grass roots efforts.
Can we get Hollywood to start producing shows that make voting cool?
