2008 Primaries Thread

yeah shrum's obviously the guy to listen to here, sheesh

what i don't understand is why "george w. bush" isn't included in every sentence these candidates make between now and election day

at this point i'm kind of hoping for a hillary win in n.h. just to hear the grinding gears of the conventional wisdom realigning again. acting like anything's sure right now is so dumb.

Drudge: Talk of HRC Exit Engulfs Campaign

gephardt, dukakis, kerrey, gore, kerry... am i missing anybody for whom shrum has campaigned for president?

honestly, while almost every candidate is implicitly distancing themself from Bush, it would probably be a waste of time opposing a lame-duck administration that's already on its way out.

xxxpost

yeah shrum's obviously the guy to listen to here, sheesh

Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day - Shrum may be an idiot, but I think his diagnosis here makes a great deal of sense.

This article was my introduction to John McCain (didn't follow 2000)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19085-2004May11.html

"Joe is bipolar and has had some severe alcohol problems as well," McCain tells a reporter. "He used to have hair. He has been accused several times of harassing interns. And he tried to pick me up this morning at the wrong end of goddamned National Airport." (Note to lawyers: He is kidding.)

"the Clinton brand"

elmo, i don't have shrum's experience with losing elections, but it's kind of amazing that he think hillary can out-"change" obama - in case you and he have forgotten, hillary is presently running a PRIMARY campaign in which she needs to point up her USP in the democratic field. if she gets the nomination, she will certainly do a pivot and run as an agent of change. clinton in 96 needed no such pivot because he didn't need to fight a primary battle

"None of us would write a check to Osama bin Laden, slip it in a Hallmark card and send it off to him. But that's what we're doing every time we pull into a gas station," - Mike Huckabee.

what i don't understand is why "george w. bush" isn't included in every sentence these candidates make between now and election day

coming soon to a general election near you...

"Let Hillary be Hillary" = SOMEONE SHOOT THAT MOTHERFUCKER

Clinton campaign is bumming Obama out

"I find the manner in which they’ve been running their campaign sort of depressing lately," he said.

"Sen. Clinton saying, 'don’t feed the American people false hopes. Get a reality check.' You know? I mean, you can picture JFK saying, 'We can’t go to the moon. It’s a false hope. Let’s get a reality check.' It’s not, sort of, I think what our tradition has been," he said.

"None of us would write a check to Osama bin Laden, slip it in a Hallmark card and send it off to him. But that's what we're doing every time we pull into a gas station," - Mike Huckabee.

-- elmo argonaut, Monday, January 7, 2008 10:25 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

huckabee quotes thread plz

what i don't understand is why "george w. bush" isn't included in every sentence these candidates make between now and election day

this is what my Mom says. they're not running against the dude.

"Bob Shrum has fought eight US presidential elections and lost them all. That has not stopped his re-emergence as an influence on Gordon Brown, an old friend to whom he has played host in Cape Cod."

The Times, September 27, 2007

--

Public dissastisfaction with Gordon Brown, according to YouGov:

July - 27%
October - 48%
December - 60%

not in the primary, at least

I don't know that Shrum is all that great, but he hasn't had very good material to work with either.

On NPR this morning HRC said she'd stay on through Super Tuesday.

Nightmare scenario: something happens to Bush in the Middle East and Cheney gets 12 months as president.

(Bush gave some fine Q&A answers yesterday to Israeli and Middle Eastern journalists.)

seems like bush'll have to be a central theme of the general election. republicans will make democratic candidate out to be gay mexican jihadist, democrats will make republican candidate out to be george bush.

hillary is presently running a PRIMARY campaign in which she needs to point up her USP in the democratic field. if she gets the nomination, she will certainly do a pivot and run as an agent of change. clinton in 96 needed no such pivot because he didn't need to fight a primary battle

But I think the point is that she didn't have to choose "experience" as her selling point. There were other options available to her: as the first woman to run for President, she could have made a convincing pitch for herself as the choice of change. She could have run on her vision for the future. Instead she chose to run as the candidate of experience - which turned out to be a very problematic choice, for reasons that Shrum mentions.

you're suggestion that hillary ask people to vote for her because she's a woman??

when someone loses theres always the tendency to blame the strategy but a lot of the time its just cause theyre not as good as the competition.

She could've done this in a sly way. Put a mother in the White House, etc.

Cokie Roberts inside-Beltway-media/pols-whorehouse hilarity yesterday on Stephanopoulos: "No matter which Democrat wins, there'd be a lot of changes."

DECKCHAIRS

i think the point is that she sort of DID have to choose "experience" as her selling point, because the other positions were already staked out so clearly. head-to-head with obama as to who is the breath of fresh air, there is simply no way she can win that.

as for "her vision of the future" she's been a lot more specific about that than obama has been!

There's nothing wrong with experience per se, but the problem for Hillary is that the concept of experience carries a lot of baggage for her. For one thing, it leads her to run on her experience as First Lady, which for a lot of people, reminds them of precisely things they didn't like about her in the '90s. A lot of people had a problem with the "two for one" argument given by the Clintons for why the First Lady, an unelected position, which had traditionally been completely ceremonial in nature, should now become a policy-making role. Once stung by the healthcare reform defeat, Hillary retreated to a more traditional First Spouse role. Now she is reviving that whole controversy as her chief selling point!

xposts

I'm not saying she should say "vote for me because I have two X chromosomes" - but I think she could have used that inescapable fact to put her whole candidacy in a different light. Instead of using it as an advantage, it seems like she sees it as a liability - one that she has to defuse by being more cautious and centrist than her competitors.

http://www.pollster.com/NHTopzDems600.png

i don't think she's wrong about that

as for your first graf i think you've clearly defined the hurdles she has to overcome

xpost

lol @ totally straight line - BIDEN SUPPORTERS ARE NOT AFFECTED BY ANYTHING

That's really her style, though -- she is very good at talking policy and elaborating on her own plans, and you could easily make the case that Hillary is really the most rational, methodical candidate in her field. That said, policy wonking is not a very inspiring tactic for voters whose policy preferences depend on whether they feel they can believe in and trust the candidate.

"biden their time"

Instead of using it as an advantage, it seems like she sees it as a liability

But objectively, I think being a woman is an electoral liability, more so than being a black man. These kinds of super-aggressive, head-to-head contests just don't work so well for women. Which is why Hillary comes across as shrill and nasty when she's on the attack, when if she were a man, she'd probably come across as witty and forceful.

Hillary comes across as shrill and nasty because she's shrill and nasty, not cuz she's a woman!

take a bow

biden their time even after he dropped out

Did Gravel officially drop out?

<i>Hillary comes across as shrill and nasty because she's shrill and nasty, not cuz she's a woman!</i>

No, rubbish! Men can just get away with it more easily, it's more expected of them. Look at McCain's neat little put-downs of Romney in the last debate. They worked well for him, but if Hillary tried something similar against Obama, she'd just seem nasty with it.

I think that's bcz Romney, even w/ politics aside, is so clearly an ass.

Are we talking about "perception" versus "reality"? Look, when she attacks she's merely shrill, period. She does though have a way with an imperious one-liner.

As expected, Hillary's national lead collapses like the Big Dig. Rasmussen had her up by 17 last week... today she's up by 4.

yr both right - her shrill nastiness doesnt play as well cause shes a woman.

I know I'm going down a dangerous road by saying this, but Barack Obama is black in just about the least threatening way possible to white Americans that might otherwise have a problem with a black candidate. He's a bi-racial guy raised in the Midwest, and he doesn't have any of the trappings of the stereotype of "Black Politician" that gets denigrated so much on Fox News. Plenty of Americans will vote for a black candidate as long as he doesn't remind them too much that he's black.

If anything, I think whispering campaigns about his "MUSLIM PAST" will hurt him more than his race.

Hillary on the other hand has qualities that people who are already hesitant about a woman president especially dislike in a woman (though, as pointed out, they'd be fine in a man).

no one says a man is "shrill" unless he has a skinny neck

Ron Paul can get pretty shrill.

It's the Tiger Woods thing, Hurting.

can I just say?

LOL HILLARY FIREWALL GETTIN' HAXXOR3D

no one says a man is "shrill" unless he has a skinny neck

Well exactly. The very fact that there's a pejorative gender-specific term for aggressive behaviour...

U CAN SAY THAT LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL