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Dem strategists: If you want to beat Hillary, attack
Get ready for the race to the Democratic nomination to get ugly. Democratic strategists say polls and fundraising show Hillary Clinton is all but unstoppable — unless the gloves come off. The Associated Press reports:
“If Hillary wins Iowa, she can practically start shopping for a running mate,” said California-based Democratic strategist Dan Newman.
But that’s a big if. Clinton has called Iowa her “hardest state,” and it’s the best-some say only-chance her opponents have to get past her.
“At this point the trailing candidates need to not only catch a huge wave, they also need one to crash on top of Hillary,” Newman said. “They need to upend the conventional wisdom that is gelling among donors and others that she can’t be stopped, and they need to prove it in Iowa.”
back to top5 Comments to “Dem strategists: If you want to beat Hillary, attack”
Where is a swift boat when you need one?
I think the ‘Pub strategists have been chatting with the Dems because every candidate has been attack-Hillary-all-the-time.
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Hillary is Bush’s fault.
Oh, I guess that would be Bill’s fault.
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If there is one thing I can’t stand, it’s the “inevitability” mantra in politics. It makes me onry and more likely to vote for the other guy, just to stick it to them. Even if Hillary does win Iowa, that doesn’t mean the race is over.
I trust a “campaign strategist” about as much as a used car salesman. They have a vested interest, and they’ll do and say anything.
Folks – don’t listen to them. Be an informed voter and vote for whomever you want.
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Good advice, but way too late. Ages ago, Hillary took the advice of President Grant, who said that in America there is no political advantage in opposing war. Whether or not she want to, she understood that she had to be a hawk. Barak and John, both mindful of the same political principle, took a pass on the opportunity to punish Hillary for being a hawk. That was fateful. On the moral issue of war, you have only one chance to mount an opposition, and that’s at the beginning of a debate. Barak and John will only make themselves look weak if they voice criticisms now which they should have articulated before.
Hillary already is running a general election campaign against Mitt-Rudy. Hillary needs to sound as hawkish as Sen. Lieberman & Kyle so that she can crowd the eventual Republican candidate over to the guard rail of looniness, where the electorate begins to wonder about going over a cliff. She’s not afraid of sounding too hawkish for the general electorate, because voters realize that whatever she does, she won’t be so half-cocked as to actually drive over the edge, as GeoBush has done. The only place where her strategy might not work is Iowa, but that won’t be enough to stop her in the other primaries.
Hillary is other Democratic senators’ fault. She is the voters’ fault. If a few Democratic senators had been willing to go down in defeat in 2000 and 2004 opposing the war and prosecuting the case against Bush, she would not be a candidate today, and our troops would be on the way out. But some politicians would have to have lost at the polls, not like Max Cleland, but like the dissidents in Chinese jails.
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. . . like dissidence in China who stood in the path of the tank and got run over.
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