The Low Road to Victory

From The NY Times (which endorsed Hillary for the Dem nomination):

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.

If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”

By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama.

Read it all.

Posted by Kevin K. on 04/23/08 at 12:25 AM • Permalink

Here is a link to a related article online, in print format.

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MediaMentions

Hillary is truly a NeoCon. Too bad her supporters in general are too stupid to care about minute details like bombing Iran and deregulating the banking industry.

Gimme an Ouch!  Gimme a Panic!  Gimme an Oh, Crap!

She’s better than McCain, which isn’t saying much at this point, but c’mon… She offers nothing except “I’ll make a speech or an ad for your issue, vote for me!!!”

I had a conversation today with a local Democratic supporter and he said, cliches be damned, that he’d vote for McCain over Hillary.  I’m not that far gone but shit, man… She’s lost it.

It’s not about the nation anymore - it’s about not losing.  I feel bad for her, in a sense, but she has to face the fact that America wants more than she’s willing to offer.

Nice work on this stuff, btw.