Hillary Coronation?

24 December 2007 |permalink | email article

Virtually on the eve of the Iowa caucuses, the issue has been firmly joined. Hillary Clinton wants to make the race a tight embrace about the successes of her husband’s two-term record in the 1990s – a bold declaration that theirs was, in fact, a co-presidency, as The Washington Post reported.

Barack Obama challenges this position, saying it’s time to “turn the page” on partisanship – and implicitly the scandals of the Clinton era. He argues to Democratic voters that he is the most electable and strong in states where Clinton is polarizing.

She’s focused on the “we” of Bill Clinton’s presidency and, after unsuccessfully trying to upstage Obama’s core argument that he’s the “change” candidate, has reverted to the questionable message that she’s the “experience” candidate while he’s the “novice.”

Her use of the E-word falls flat because Bill Clinton in 1992 was a “roll of the dice” candidate himself who had the same limited national experience while governor of Arkansas as emergent Republican frontrunner Mike Huckabee later in Little Rock. 

So we are asked to go back to the future and Bill Clinton’s old campaign reprise that, while far less experienced than President George H. W. Bush, voters again would get the same “two for the price of one” with Hillary in the Oval Office. That argument may now work to Obama’s advantage.

Bob Shrum, the gifted Democratic wordsmith and senior strategist to John Kerry in 2004 who’s worked with Bill Clinton in the past, recently discussed the former president and his wife’s campaign with The New York Times.

“The biggest danger for her is that he reinforces this sense of back to the future. People don’t want to go back to the future, they want to go forward to the future.”

(An insightful article on ‘The Clinton Referendum’ by Matt Bai appeared Sunday at nytimes.com/magazine.)

Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s words seem appropriate – that while the past is over and the future has not yet happened, we must live in the present moment. For me, that means moving toward tomorrow, not recreating political yesterdays.

 

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