I may be on the other side of the pond, but I can hear the death knell from here: Is Hillary really finished? The NYTimes, which endorsed her early on as I recall, seems to be of that mindset here and here. (Notice the baby she’s holding in the second picture. Even a cute kid can’t even help her.) All the pundits, the Times says, are beginning to line up against her, leading off with Tim Russert — Tim Russert?! Since when is HE the Godfather of American political thought?
As adamant as Mrs. Clinton appeared on Wednesday [before West Virginia], several advisers said that how long she would stay in the race was an open question. Some top Clinton fund-raisers said that the campaign was all but over and suggested that she was simply buying time on Wednesday to determine if she could raise enough money and still win over superdelegates, the elected officials and party leaders who could essentially hand Mr. Obama the nomination.
It was just a few months ago, February I think, that I told my ultra right-wing conservative brother-in-law (to his horror) that he’d better get used to having Hillary Clinton around, because I didn’t see anything stopping her. What did I miss?
Time Magazine online lists five (only five?) mistakes she made in her campaign, the biggest mistake being that she misjudged the mood of the nation: she ran like an incumbent (I think she THOUGHT she was an incumbent) instead of picking up early that this election (like most, in my long experience as a voter) was about change. Plus she had some pretty dumb people working for her.
If this election is about change, then how is a weary electorate going to look at an aging (and allegedly cranky) John McCain in comparison with the imperially slim and usually unruffled Barack Obama?
The Brits are actually quite interested in the American race, although the whole delegate thing and the Electoral College is a mystery to them (and to me, come to think about it). We had an interesting conversation with a couple at a Covent Garden cafe Saturday about Obama’s viability. PM Gordon Brown, the man insisted, is a Communist, and the 20,000 jobs he’s allegedly created for the British economy have all been in government. “You don’t grow unless the economy helps create wealth, and you don’t create wealth by putting in more government jobs,” he insisted.
We’ll be back in time for the National Convention, which should be a real circus this year.
May 8, 2008 at 5:55 am
Change is not always for the best, look at the change from Blair to Brown? People over there want Brown out all ready. But what I don’t understand is that the people didn’t have a say about Brown being PM..
http://goodtimepolitics.com/2008/05/07/conservatives-happier-than-liberals/