2008 Primaries Thread

Hillary Clinton would make a competent, knowledgeable, and responsible President. Barack Obama just might make a transformative one.

Notice the difference in verbs though: "would make" vs. "just might make". This is kind of how I see it too. It's hard to imagine that Clinton wouldn't at least be a competent, effective President, but she's unlikely to change the nature of the political conversation. Obama, OTOH, is a more speculative bet, but with more upside. He might change the political landscape - or he might be an ineffectual idealist (shades of Carter, perhaps).

isn't Zbignew Brzezinski one of Obama's top advisors? lol

clinton: low risk, low return
obama: high risk, high return
mccain: high risk, low return

?

Should Democrats fear democracy?

"competent president" = things continue to get worse, more slowly

well gradual decline (which is inevitable) is better than a freefall... hilary is the safe choice

"A Clinton Presidency is going to be unexciting, not especially idealistic and only better by comparison with Bush. But it will break no one's hearts."

interesting sentiment from some livejournal linked by some blog

not that i agree, but a perspective to understand the obama-wariness in most traditional dems

It will break conservatives' hearts, and delight GOP fundraisers.

Gov. Gregoire for Obama! w00t.

see this is what confuses me: clinton: low risk, low return, but i take it this assumes she'll get elected. i've never understood why clinton is seen as a low risk candidate -- sure, she's likely to run a competent presidency and in that regard she is low risk.

but yea, that's assuming she gets elected, which is huge fucking assumption. as a candidate in a general election, she strikes as being the higher risk by far. as others have mentioned 1000x, it just doesn't seem likely that she'll win over any new supporters apart from the normal democratic constituencies, i.e. exactly what gore and kerry won previously, i.e. not enough to win the general election i just don't see her winning over anybody that mccain couldn't win more easily.

isn't Zbignew Brzezinski one of Obama's top advisors? lol

Obama was one of his star students

clinton: low risk, low return
obama: high risk, high return

I understand that this is all part of the "experience vs. change" narrative, but what is the actual 'high risk' w/ Obama? That he'll crumble under the pressure, or not put people more experienced than him in the cabinet? I'm just trying to imagine what the nightmare scenario is with him, and other than him failing to clean up the Iraq mess really well or magically save the economy (things I'm not entirely sure any president would be capable of right now, at least in one term), I'm not sure what that is.

Brzezinski was against the Iraq War from the beginning, I believe. And he's a smart guy, if perhaps a bit too dove-ish for some.

Reading the Wikipedia Jimmy Carter page, it's interesting to note other parallels:

- Like this year, in 1976 there was a wide-open field in the Democratic primary.

- Carter started the campaign as an underdog with low national name-recognition.

- A key to Carter's success was favorable coverage by the national news media:

The media discovered and promoted Carter. As Lawrence Shoup noted in his 1980 book The Carter Presidency and Beyond:

"What Carter had that his opponents did not was the acceptance and support of elite sectors of the mass communications media. It was their favorable coverage of Carter and his campaign that gave him an edge, propelling him rocket-like to the top of the opinion polls. This helped Carter win key primary election victories, enabling him to rise from an obscure public figure to President-elect in the short space of 9 months."

On the economic front, it's not hard to see parallels between the stagflation that confronted the Carter administration, and what will likely be the situation facing the next President.

also, they've both got big ears and a funny smile

I was pleased to find out last night that my mom voted for Obama. She's roughly Hillary's age and is an ambitious businesswoman, so I guess I just assumed that she'd vote for one of her own. She said she was on the fence until election day, but in the end she decided she wanted to send a message that she wanted more than just politics as usual. And she compared Obama to JFK, saying that she's confident that if he is the nominee that he would attract "the best and brightest" to work for him.

I'd really like to know more about Carter's presidency, he's such an interesting figure.. whats a good book on the subject?

they've both got big ears and a funny smile

Huckabee, too. In fact, Obama and Huckabee could create the BIG-EARS UNITY TICKET that the country so desperately wants.

I convinced my grandma to vote for Obama.

I'd really like to know more about Carter's presidency, he's such an interesting figure.. whats a good book on the subject?

The Poseidon Adventure

The mass media also torpedoed Carter's last year w/ the incessant castration-fear drumbeat of AMERICA HELD HOSTAGE

(j/k). Carter was perhaps underrated. Unlike the Presidents to follow him, he had too much humility and modesty to pass off responsibility for bad happenings on other people (e.g., his famous "the economy's woes are my fault" speech, which you can't imagine a President giving today).

Alex in Baltimore OTM. I've had the same discussion with the very smart but weirdly neocon-ish dude in the office across the hall. I guess I understand some of the apprehension w/r/t to Obama, but it seems weirdly vociferous among otherwise reasonable indies and even Dems (this is all personal experience. I don't have any polls to back this up).

At the very least, dude couldn't do worse than the last 8 yrs even if he called a press conference each and every morning of his term to let the American public watch him take a dump on the White House lawn.

xp: wait a sec, Carter's "malaise" speech was widely interpreted as putting blame on the American public. (also unimaginable today, as was his winning the nom with NO MONEY)

For anyone who's studied political science, the Carter comparison makes you cringe--the Carter administration is a legendary source of cautionary tales. Neudstadt's (and someone else's) book Thinking in Time contains so many critiques of Carter's actions that at one point they actually apologize for picking on him.

Point is, there are important differences, not the least of which is that Obama's been a senator and so has national experience, whereas Carter came from Georgia and tried to change Washington with new people. Unlike Carter, Obama is shying away from talking about timeframes for getting things done, which is good. And he does seem more savvy about how Washington works than Carter was. Obama's strategy thus far has been underappreciated and savvy as hell. Carter took advantages of new electoral rules and post-Watergate cynicism to come from behind. Clinton came from behind on a message of hope as a southern governor too. And he had many of Carter's problems. I think Obama's smart enough to avoid them. He'll make his own mistakes.

Ambinder offers a list of potential McCain Veeps:

1. Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R-MN)
2. Gov. John Huntsman (R-UT)
3. Sen. John Thune (R-SD)
4. Ex-Sen. Fred Thompson
5. Ex-Sen. George Allen
6. Gov. Bobby Jindall (R-LA)
7. Mike Huckabee
8. Gov. Charlie Crist (R-FL)
9. Mitt Romney

Carter was a nice guy but a horrible president.

Obama's message isn't "Washington is Broken" but "Let's All Stop Being Such Dicks For a Half-Second, OK?" He's more looking to return the system to some sort of stability than he is in reforming it. (Which makes uh certain folks here see red, I'm sure.)

Haha uh I guess I should say is a nice guy, huh.

ok, HALF my bus on the way to work was vacant. I was the youngest person on the bus, I'm usually in the older half. Obamahooky in effect.

(if I wasn't already caucusing for O, going to work, and knowing that half of the city is going to the rally at noon today, I'd be playing hooky too)

Brzezinski is NOT by any stretch a "dove."

Maybe I'm mis-remembering it, but I thought he took blame for at least a large portion of the economy's woes during that speech.

I'll look into it later.

(xp)

You're right, Alfred. But Brzezinski was against the Iraq War from the beginning (I believe), and he's been pilloried for it.

Walter Karp wrote a few sympathetic essays on the Carter administration - how as genuine insurgents he was regarded with something like contempt by the Democratic Party establishment and was thus doomed to fail. But it didn't help that he and his staff held Congress in such contempt that Tip O'Neil and others wouldn't even return his phone calls by the third year.

the inclusion of george "macaca" allen is a bit o_0, he was on stage at CPAC before McCain, and he'd make a good attack dog but his recent loss and lampooning in the media would make him a huge liability to a GE campiagn, y/n? xxxpost

I think that Sanford and maybe Barbour are leading McCain veep possibilities.

Gook/Macaca '08

Yeah, seriously, it won't be Huckabee. He's one of the few people the right-wing talk-show circuit hates more than John McCain.

Dobson's endorsing Huck!

Barbour!?

Carter's presidency also underlined the importance of the bully pulpit. He was notoriously weak at communication and handled the media ineptly.

Interesting details from the new TIME poll:

The poll also sampled all voters' views of several possible vice presidential choices — and their various impacts on a potential race. According to the survey results, 62% of likely voters want Hillary Clinton to name Obama as her running mate. By contrast, only 51% of the same voters want Obama to return the favor. The same voters, by a margin of 55% to 11%, believed that Obama would help rather than hurt Clinton's chances were he to become her running mate. If Obama tapped Clinton as his running mate, that margin shifted, with 38% saying it would help his chances and 31% saying it would hurt.

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1711123,00.html?xid=rss-nation

pretty much nails the "hillary clinton has higher negatives" plank in place, like the press wasn't slow enough to catch on to that

yea, too bad half the voters haven't caught on to that

Barbour!?

-- Rock Hardy, Friday, February 8, 2008 11:13 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

!?!?!?

Re: Gov. Gregoire endorsement of Obama.

Perspective: Gregoire isn't a wildly popular governor here, although more respected now than before. I apologize for deferring to racial breakdowns here, but Gregoire is the first high ranking white female in Washington to endorse Obama and is a superdelegate (Dem Senators Maria Cantwell and Patty Murray endorsed Clinton, no endorsement yet from J. McDermott yet), which might send a message to a lot of her otherwise-Clinton-supporting fans of a similar demographic in the state.

Also, far less transparent, endorsing Obama is good for her campaign this year. O being popular in Seattle and relatively *more* popular in more conservative eastern Washington ("Hillaryhate" if you must), especially. Although I'll give her credit and assume she may have endorsed Obama because she fucking wanted to. Gregoire has grown some gonads the past 4 years, and I've liked her more and more over time.

Pawlenty as VP? When your only nat'l recognition is based on the fact that an interstate bridge collapsed after you cut taxes, that's kind of a negative, isn't it?

The GOP hates metal and pavement

naw conservatives love the guy, plus he's young, and he hung on in '06. even the most daring dfl-ers around here arguing that the bridge collapse was the fault of gop 'drown it in a bathtub' policy couldn't blame it on pawlenty outright (correlation not causation)