Too bad Paul Tsongas isn't around to give charisma lessons anymore.
She also has a tendency to surround herself with terrible people. Is Mark Penn on board for 2016?
I read somewhere that she hired everybody.
I think 2 points out what is probably the most serious problem. I mean, even if Penn isn't involved it's not like he was some weird outlier in the people she picked. He was just the most expensive/ludicrous one.
Yeah, plus, even if Mark Penn isn't directly involved, a lot of people near the top of the 2016 organization will have gotten to where they are by sucking up to Mark Penn. That's just not a good filter.
He was just the most expensive/ludicrous one.
Lanny Davis begs to differ.
What exactly do you guys pay attention to, that I never bother to, that informs you as to the personality of various behind-the-scenes member of a campaign? I know all these names but I couldn't argue anything about any of them.
This thread won't be divisive and depressing at all.
I wish someone would let her know that good public speaking doesn't require one to draw out each word.
If only she knew somebody who was a good public speaker.
7: I think I just read TPM and TAPPED all the time in 2008. In 2012 I didn't read much of anything covering the campaigns and couldn't tell you much about the people involved beyond the actual candidates.
Mark Penn? Lanny Davis? Pfff.
Most expensive: Robert Rubin.
Most ridiculous: Dick Morris (though he's no longer on board).
Oh gross. Dick Morris and I share a birthday.
You misspelled "prostitute's toes."
I thought I read somewhere that she has recruited some of the people from Obama's campaigns? I don't have a source handy, and I'm sure she's kept some of her incompetent flunkies out of loyalty, but I assume she's smart enough to pick at least some of the winners.
As for charisma, I agree that it's a problem for her but I don't want to handicap her based on that until I see who the Republican nominee is. Romney definitely isn't very charismatic. I'd be a lot more worried about the charisma of some other Republicans. (But then, what do I know, call me Paul Kael.)
2: She and Bill seem to have got this skill down pat. And by that I mean Pat Caddell. Not to mention Dick Morris.
HRC is so far out in front of the rest of the Democratic pack that there isn't much to say about it. It's her turn and I suspect she will walk to the nomination. I'm much more interested in the GOP race. Once again, every candidate has a fatal flaw, but *somebody* is going to win it.
pwned on the Dick
Put ice on it before it starts to swell.
If Huckabee wins the Republican primary, it will be all Arkansas all the time.
19: Wait, have I been doing it wrong all these years?
20: It would also be a point in favor of the hypothesis that the universe exists to amuse me.
Would it have mattered if HRC was President the last 6 years? I feel like Obama's Presidency proves the fundamental irrelevancy of most of the things that came up in the Obama-Clinton battles of 2008.
23: Yes, it's so hard to say what would have been different if HRC would have been President. Would we have more or less troops in Iraq/Afghanistan? Would we have something better than Obamacare or nothing at all? etc. etc. I don't have a clue.
what would have been different if HRC would have been President
We wouldn't be living in a post-racial society, for starters.
25, 26: Yes, instead we would be living in a post-sex society.
I am heartened to see Obama finally telling Netanyahu to go fuck himself. That, at least, seems vanishingly unlikely to have happened under an HRC presidency. But it's hard to identify much else that might have been different.
Historians would have called it the Refractory Period.
I endorse 28. The whole thing with inviting Netanyahu to speak was a deliberate attempt to poke Obama in the eye and it seems to have failed.
Obama vs. Clinton I think comes down to whether Clinton would have done more with the temporarily near filibuster proof Democratic majority. In some alternative universe it may have been possible to convince the Dems who watered down bills in the hope of re-election who lost big anyway that they never had a chance and would be better off going down fighting instead of running away from legislation they shaped by getting in the way. You'd probably need a more progressive revolving door for that, though and that's not where the money is.
The visceral negative reaction that people have to Hillary is fascinating to me. I don't share it at all. Not even a little.
I'll grant that she's no Reagan/Bill/Obama/Kennedy. But she's an easy match, charisma-wise, for Bushes/McCain/Romney/Dole/Kerry/Gore/Mondale/Dukakis/Carter/Ford/Nixon/Humphrey/Johnson/McGovern.
Not to mention the likely Republicans this year, with the exception of Huckabee, who really is a charismatic son of a bitch.
I find her a more wooden speech-giver than most of those Republicans.
I liked Dole. He clearly held the world in contempt and was only making enough effort to hide that from people who weren't paying attention.
33: Yeah, see, that's what I mean. I don't get that at all.
28 - There's an interesting thing where, just as the Republican Congress seems to be trying to make an end-run around America's actual foreign policy apparatus to demonstrate their fealty to Likud hawkishness on Iran, Mossad and the Israeli military seem to be trying to get around the actual Israeli state department to try to get some sort of non-proliferation agreement in place.
At this point, I have a genuine schoolboy crush on Elizabeth Warren, even though I know full well it is foolish to put your faith in politicians.
Is it a good idea strategically to support her in the primaries?
If Warren runs, I'll vote for her in New Hampshire. But I don't think she should run. She's got better things to do.
38: I'll certainly be voting Warren if she runs.
38.2: Only if she runs.
But even if she doesn't run you can vote for her just to prove your devotion, and it won't hurt.
I believe her when she says she won't be a candidate. She is becoming the de facto leader of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, and that's a much more interesting job than runner-up in an essentially predetermined primary race.
35: When I hear her give a speech, I get a running mental commentary on the specifics that I want to pull her aside and tell her. "See your inflection there? Let that pause go a little longer. Chuckle at yourself before delivering that next line, because it's super cheesy and you need to indicate that you get that." Etc.
On the other hand, I used to practice how I delivered jokes and stories in the mirror, in high school, until they were sufficiently amusing.
42 doesn't take into account the influential Unfogged primary, which Warren would win handily.
Bernie Sanders should totally run, though. I'll vote for him.
de facto leader of the Progressive Caucus in Congress
I was curious about that so I googled it and it turns out there is a Congressional Progressive Caucus, and Warren isn't even a member. Not that this necessarily contradicts what apo is saying.
http://cpc.grijalva.house.gov/caucus-members/
23: Most of the high points of Obama's presidency (as a result of Republican obstructionism) have come from the people he's managed to appoint to various offices (supreme court justices, attorney general, etc.). Hilary Clinton (1) very likely would have been more 'centrist' when it came to these things, and (2) has displayed a consistent inability to pick reliable people when it comes to her own personal staff/advisers/etc. So I'd guess if there was a difference it would have showed up there.
Also like a lot of people here I would literally walk over broken glass to vote for Warren.
I use that broken glass quote a lot to describe myself.
I agree with the post, but it is also worth remembering that Clinton was plenty charismatic as Secretary of State. My ex-pat friend said she had a fantastic international rep (for following up on every detail, he said. You hand her a bottled water, you get a thank you note.) and she inspired that sunglasses, sending messages meme. She came across great as Secretary of State.
I think not being John Kerry really helped her on that one.
I should say that I'm not fundamentally worried about the next election. But this is the one thing that gives me pause.
I have heard (firsthand) that she is, indeed, very charismatic in person. I still think she was more charismatic in '08 than people give her credit for, but A. it paled next to Obama, and B. there's such a long narrative of her as uncharismatic* that, once she lost, people went to the default.
*one I don't disagree with - she never seemed that great in front of crowds before '08, not that I saw.
I guess she had charisma in her role as Secretary of State, but my impression of how she actually performed the job was pretty poor. Undermining USAID, leaving Susan Rice out to dry on the Benghazi thing, that godawful "reset" with Russia.
Foreign policy under Obama only looks decent because he followed an administration that turned it over to a bunch of goddamned lunatics. Take the GWB administration out of the picture, and Obama's record is consistent with the past many decades (which have been consistently and bipartisanly shitty).
New Obama has ditched the dysfunctional Cuba policy, which is nice.
55: That is a genuine improvement, true.
47: OTOH, possibly Obama's single biggest unforced error was appointing a bunch of red state governors to Cabinet positions. Hate Jan Brewer? Thank Obama. Like Sam Brownback? Thank Obama. And Salazar was just awful as Sec'y of the Interior (although at least CO stayed blue in the governor's mansion).
There's no reason to think HRC would make such dumb choices (presumably she's aware of the importance of governors), so it may have been a net wash. Oh, and Kagan, at least, was viewed by liberals as a lousy, centrist choice, so I'm not sure she really goes in BHO's column: either he got lucky, or she was perfectly likely to have been nominated by HRC, or both.
To be clear, it's not that I think 47 is wrong, exactly, but I think it overstates how good Obama's appointments/nominations have been, and ascribes lousy appointments/nominations to HRC beyond what's fair surmise.
I guess my overall feeling is that HRC would have been very unlikely to be more liberal or more effective on any given issue, but that BHO has left enough on the table that she could have netted out positive by getting just one or two of those items right (hell, if she could have found another $200B of stimulus, that would be worth almost anything Obama's done short of health care - and I'm pretty sure the ACA wouldn't have played out an iota worse under HRC, because the blueprint was exactly hers, most of the mess was in Congress, and I don't think BHO did anything particularly correct* in getting it passed).
The bottom line is that, if HRC had run exactly the Obama presidency to date, 95% of the people on this blog (surely including me) would be gnashing their teeth that Obama didn't win, because he'd have been soooo much better. Rahm and Geithner alone would have been offered as sufficient proof that she should never have been nominated.
*somebody recently proved to me that he (rather than Pelosi) does deserve credit for the final push of getting it through on reconciliation, but that was a matter of will, not ideology. I see no reason to think she'd quit at the 1 yard line on her second attempt at her signature issue.
Who are the other options? I have the impression that, apart from Warren, there isn't anyone else in the race?
The proposal in 48 is maybe the first thing I've ever seen from Warren that I do not like.
59: Apart from Warren, who isn't actually in the race.
I don't like it on a philosophical level, but, on the practical level of "we need to find some goddamn funding for science", I think its good.
58: OTOH, we might be at war with Iran.
Oh, and Kagan, at least, was viewed by liberals as a lousy, centrist choice,
She was? I thought people liked her, and were just worried because she liked softball better than having babies.
59. James Webb is running. I don't know if even he has noticed. There are certainly persistent hints that Joe Biden will run, or maybe he's just pranking us.
It's pretty clear that if HRC doesn't mess up in the coming year she will be the nominee. As for her charisma, I'm reminded of the old joke: "The reason people don't think Buffalo is very exciting is because it's so near Cleveland."
66: No, lots of people were concerned, I think not exactly because there was good reason to affirmatively think she'd be lousy/centrist, but because she wasn't someone we could be sure was not lousy/centrist. I.e., she was neither a federal judge nor a super prolific academic, and her other prominent roles (law school dean, SG) didn't do much to illuminate things, so there wasn't much good evidence of what she'd be like on the bench, there were plenty of other possible candidates with a solid liberal track record, and given the composition of the Senate at the time there was no need to be cautious.
Her high school affiliation should have been enough. If you can say anything about my people, we're reliably squishy liberals.
Counterpoint: her college affiliation. (Barely relatedly: someone should really take Robert George up on his latest offer.)
Someone I know quite well interpreted for HRC on one of the official state visits she took with WJC toward the end of the time when they (last?) lived in the WH. She came back very favorably impressed with HRC, saying no one she had ever worked for showed remotely the level of consideration for her as HRC had; found her both charming and caring.
57.1 - Ken Salazar was a senator, not governor.
Also, re 58, how do you match that with the reporting about people -- both shitty people like Rahm Emmanuel* and generally decent people like Barney Frank -- were advising Obama to blow up the plan in favor of universal Medicare for children or something similar?
* Whom, at least, didn't replicate the early Clinton White House problem of not really having his pulse on what Congress was thinking.
Funny, I'm having a debate about the same Warren proposal on another (pharma-centric) blog and the opinions are inverted, most hate her with a couple people saying something needs to be done to stop having pharma just work fines into the cost of doing business.
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Hallelujah! Hallelujah! (Add appropriate musical intonation)
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Suspiciously close to where certain regular commenters live, I should note...
It was stolen at Christmas and there were only 76 bottles. That they were nearly all recovered clears everyone I know.
I sat next to a guy in a bar once who claimed to work in the White House kitchens. He said that Bill was awesome (and a frequent visitor to the kitchen), but that Hillary was "a total bitch."
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Oh jeez. Social services people are not internet people. Family Advocacy Program is a bad acronym.
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79: Did he also say Bill was a ballsy, take-charge kinda guy?
73: The reporting about Rahm was exactly why I always credited Pelosi, but IIRC LeMieux produced a very credible link to a story that even she was quailing, and Obama said, "Fuck it, we're doing it."
I can't recall the source now, but it was close to unimpeachable. It went against my instincts plus years of clinging to the pro-Pelosi narrative, so you'll have to trust my bona fides that I wouldn't buy it if it were at all dubious.
Is there a book out there about passage of the ADA? Could've been from that.
Ken Salazar was a senator, not governor.
Whoops. But as I said, the sin there was that he was a shitty choice for the job, not that he cost the Dems a seat (although even so, it was a dumb risk).
80: If they have a fund raising event, can I suggest a name?
Family Advocacy Program is a bad acronym.
I shit you not, there's a Central Utah Narcotics Task Force. I have buddies on various DEA interagency assignments who swear they've seen shirts and hats for those guys with exactly the acronym you're imagining.
"CUNT Force" sounds like a dirty comic book.
Supposedly there was some spelling of "taskforce" early on. I found at least one example of that usage on one of the sheriff sites in that area.
http://www.sanpetesheriff.org/Task.html
87: Yeah, you remember that triangular thing that Link was trying to fill in the Legend of Zelda...
I am now hoping that their most successful members are honored with special hats, calling them "Ace".
I'm sure I've told more than once about my one-on-one encounters w HRC and WJC a couple weeks apart, in 2000, where his was flat, and her's was magic.
Counterfactual history is a dumb game, and I don't think we can remotely guess how things would have gone differently. It is clear that 99% of the shit that goes on in primary campaigns is lame and irrelevant. The one thing we learned is that his people were a little more diligent, and a little less entitled, than hers, and that made all the difference. In the Texas caucus and the California primary, but nowhere else. (I mean, no where of any meaning after July 1, 2008).
Warren isn't running, and I'll say it: people should quit mooning about her or some other great hope, and work on having a party that pulls HRC leftward. Ballot issues, state races, issue groups: there are ways to affect the zeitgeist, and mooning about people who aren't in the race isn't on that list.
No one-on-one encounter, but I once attended an event where HRC spoke, and she was impressive. Not charismatic (that she will never be), but supersmart and energetic and engaged with about five issues at once. I do not like, do not trust, political charisma; but of course I recognize that charm, crowd appeal, and photogenic and telegenic qualities are important for a presidential candidate.
But unless the GOP has some other candidate that they've been keeping up their sleeve, I think HRC could more than hold her own against Mitt or Jeb (though Jeb does scare me a bit, I will admit).
And anyway, as Charley points out, Warren is not running. And neither is Biden, I might add. And if Biden did run, he would be soundly defeated, whereas, like it or not, HRC is the Dems' best chance (and probably only chance) to hold on to the White House in 2016.
One of the problems for Hilary's campaign was that the people setting up the strategy (Mark Penn especially) did not know how the votes were counted in the various states. That goes a bit beyond being a little less diligent than Obama's campaign staff...
93: Yup. My favorite example:
Take two states that held Super Tuesday contests on Feb. 5: big New Jersey, with 107 pledged delegates at stake, and tiny Idaho, with 18 delegates up for grabs. Clinton won New Jersey's primary and made headlines for doing so early on that night, while Obama won Idaho's caucuses long after many of those watching had gone to bed. But because of the rules of proportionality, Clinton netted just 11 more delegates than Obama from her New Jersey victory, while he gained 12 more than her by winning Idaho.
I imagine those Idaho delegates came a lot cheaper too...
93 -- That's exactly what I meant, though, and I think diligence is a reasonable term for it. They didn't think they needed to read the rules, because surely winning big states in big media markets is how you win. Knowing the exact rules is a task for for nerds.
Anyway, I don't think we can say that this told us anything at all about how HRC would have run the White House, what sort of nominees she would have sent to the Senate for the judiciary, whether she would have been as deferential to Blue Dogs and the National Security State. I suppose you could argue that BHO relied too much on political nerds to find some sort of mathematically optimum positions on the stimulus and ACA, and so didn't move the envelope as much as he might have.
What I worry about is that she's stuck in the 90s, or the 00s, and isn't going to push back as hard as she could on the Village consensus.
by the way, it was Her Turn in 2006, too. she was the hands-down, no-contest, front-runner right up until the primaries actually started.
Sure, but I really don't see that kind of lightning striking again. Rewatch the Yes We Can video -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY -- can you even imagine anyone able to pull this kind of thing off in 2016? No one wants to try.
Who thinks it could possibly work?
97: Wow. I'd never seen that before. It's outstanding.
I was surprised to hear that the anti-austerity party in Spain is called Podemos.
lame and irrelevant
I can't believe you, of all people, wrote this. So hurtful.