From the ABC preview of Hillary’s interview with Christiane Amanpour (I can hardly wait to watch my two favorites together this Sunday!):
Clinton also said she expects the Tea Party’s bark to be a bit stronger than its bite when it comes to its impact on U.S. foreign policy.
“Is it possible to have the president’s foreign policy agenda furthered, even if a lot of Tea Party candidates do end up” winning, Amanpour asked Clinton in the interview, which is scheduled to air Sunday on ABC News’ “This Week.”
“Well, I’ve seen a lot of people run for office and say a lot of things and then when they have the burden of holding office and the responsibility that goes with it,” Clinton said. “I’ve seen them become very sobered, very quickly, about the challenges we face domestically and internationally.
“You know, nobody said it better than Mario Cuomo, who said, ‘You campaign in poetry, and you govern in prose.’ Sometimes the poetry can get kind of hot,” Clinton said with a laugh, “and a little over the top, but the prose brings you down to earth.”
Isn’t that the truth, Hillary? Your consistency and intellectual honesty here is on full display. It’s not like you did not tell your current boss the same thing when he ran his OFA campaign and talked a big game about changing Washington.
“You are not going to wave a magic wand and have the special interests disappear.” –Hillary Clinton, February 2008
The Obama/OFA wing of the party still hasn’t governed.
Govern, Hillary, govern. Run that parallel administration of yours that all the delusional Clinton-haters feared you would, back when your name was first floated for SoS. (That’s snarkfont on this paragraph for the snark-impaired)
In all seriousness, though, Hillary is as always laser-focused. She zeroed in on the tea party’s real weakness.
I agree with Hillary that there’s a lot of bark stronger than its bite going on and that governing will sober up candidates to the realities of Washington if they win in November. I don’t expect all the tea partiers have the stuff it takes to resist the corporate cash trough and not sell their hard right base out.
I’m going to keep going with the theme I started with in my last post:
I don’t really care who wins between the malaria that is the Dems and the smallpox that is the tea party. I can’t choose between them because neither of them represents anything similar to where I am which is that government is a fact of life, so make the most of it to help the American people. I’m not a politician who has to convince voters of where I stand on that, and I really don’t think in terms of whether government is “small” or “big” or “socialist.” I care about the fact that right now it is dominated by corporate influence. More generally, my personal shorthand for my philosophy of gov’t is that I care about making gov’t work as efficiently as possible and about making policy that gives more people more opportunities to live their life, have their liberty and rights protected and respected, and pursue their happiness so long as it doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s life, liberty, or pursuit of happiness. Neither the Ds nor the Rs, nor the teapartiers, offer that as a choice as far as I am concerned.
Yes, the poetry of the tea party’s campaigning turns me off, but so does the prose of the Dems’ governance (or rather lack thereof).
Oh, and for the record, more from the writeup:
Clinton insisted that no matter who wins in November, she will continue to make the case that the Obama administration’s international efforts are “in furtherance of America’s interest.”
She emphasized that there is bipartisan support for national security, which, Clinton said, included not only defense but also diplomacy and development.
I still see no signs that Hillary has her designs on running for president ever again. The political realities are bleak on that front, and I don’t think Hillary owes it to anyone to run after the Dem establishment and the activist left spat on her just for trying to run in 2008. They called for her to quit all while she marched forward to become not only the first woman to win presidential primaries and caucuses but also THE person, male or female, to win the most primary votes in all of presidential primary history (tip of the hat to Shirley Chisholm here for winning a non-binding primary in NJ in 1972) . I never understood how on earth anyone could insist it was Obama who did all the inspiring and that Hillary was not an inspiring candidate. But, I digress.
Hillary gave it her all in 2008 and is letting the pieces fall where they will now. She transcended the 2008 election when she moved forward from her campaign. When one door closed, she did not let that stop her from opening the next door. If my vote for her in 2008 is the one and only one I ever get to cast for her, I cannot blame her for that.
And, yet… with the tea party storm a brewin’ and the purple prose governing of the current lot of Democrats, where neither aspect of that dynamic provides any light at the end of the tunnel… with all the teabagger/socialist culture wars distracting Americans from the corporate rot infesting our politics… and with the Dems and the left only sinking deeper and deeper into Mama Grizzly Derangement Syndrome and enabling the rightwing more than they are quelling it…
With all of that going on and none of it inspiring any confidence for the future, the idealist in me–the part of me hoping against Hope™–would love for Hillary to give me a chance to vote for her again. A wonk can dream.
If any “Democratic strategist” or progressive activist wants to scoff at that, to that person I say: “bless his heart,” “buck up,” and don’t come crying about how it’s necessary to vote for Democrats to stop the Mama Grizzlies. I don’t have to vote for a DINO to stop a Mama Grizzly. How can DINOs stop a Mama Grizzly in government when they can’t even compete with her on facebook? If you want me to vote for a Democrat who can stop a Mama Grizzly, then find a way to make Hillary Clinton the Democrat to vote for. Which you aren’t going to do, so don’t even bother with the Mama Grizzly red herring.
Democrats could have stopped Mama Grizzly before she ever got started if they would have just nominated the best candidate running for president in 2008. They were profoundly low-information and short-sighted in their choice of Barack Obama. The Democrats own the blame for Mama Grizzly. She is their creation. Mama Grizzly is the poetic justice that has resulted from the out-of-hand poetry of the 2008 campaign and the nonexistent governing from 2009-2010.
Filed under: General | 110 Comments »
The Confluence 