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Charles Pierce: If Not Hillary, Who?
Excellent long magazine article from Charles Pierce on primaries, with a close look at Martin O'Malley of Maryland.
She has "cleared the field." That's what the smart people say. Without even announcing that she will run for president, Hillary Clinton has frozen the Democratic primary process. She has frozen the media's attention and the energies of the party's activists, and, most important of all, she has frozen the wallets of all the big donors, all of whom are waiting for her to jump to decide what they will be doing over the next two years. It is hard to say she's been unusually coy. After leaving her job as secretary of state, Clinton went on a massive book tour, and she's been a fixture on the high-end lecture circuit, her fees for which suddenly became a campaign issue, even though there isn't a campaign yet. And most significantly, she and her people have begun to distance themselves a bit from the president she once served. She arguably was critical of Barack Obama's "Don't do stupid shit" policy. And when the ISIS threat arose in the Middle East, there were a few strategically placed comments from anonymous "Clinton aides" that were critical of the president for not moving fast enough to meet that new threat. By the standards of the fall of 2014, by the same standards that we judge Martin O'Malley by, Hillary Clinton is clearly running for president. And they say she has cleared the field.
They say she has cleared the field because that's what political pros get paid to say, but they also say it as a kind of supplication to the gods of political chance, because there is one thing that people in the party try very hard not to talk about these days, something that remains unspoken for the same reason that theater people do not say Macbeth and baseball players never mention a no-hitter in progress.
...
It is not cowardice if it can be sold as shrewd calculation. And it can be sold as shrewd calculation, because that is the way wisdom becomes conventional, and the more conventional it becomes, the less wise it is. After all, in the spring of 1991, President George H. W. Bush, the conqueror of the Levant, had an approval rating of 80 by-God percent. This scared away most of whom were perceived to be on the Democratic party's A-list, including Andrew Cuomo's father, from challenging him. The elder Bush had cleared both fields, they said. One of the few people who stepped up was the governor of Arkansas, who put together a renegade staff that outhustled the Republicans for two years and got the governor of Arkansas, and his sharp lawyer of a wife, elected president. Some people look at a cleared field and see a place where there is limitless room to run.
...
Which brings us to the conventional contrarianism that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is more conventional than it is contrary. The speculation goes this way: Clinton had the same advantages in 2008 that she has today, with the exception of her subsequently having been secretary of state. She had first call on staff, on contributors, and on the spotlight. And she spent two years getting beaten to the punch and utterly wrong-footed by the renegade staff of a junior senator from Illinois that had a better handle on the prevailing zeitgeist and a far superior knowledge of the new communication technology and how best to put it to political use, and that got the senator from Illinois elected president. To make an easy historical parallel, Hillary Clinton in 2007 was William Seward in 1859, a senator from New York whose pockets were bulging with IOU's and who was a power in the party and its presumptive presidential nominee. Seward led the race all the way through two ballots at the 1860 Republican convention until he and his people got outmaneuvered by a judge named David Davis and the people working on behalf of a politician from Illinois whose speeches had galvanized the nation but whose political résumé was painfully limited to one term in Congress. Ultimately, of course, and to close the historical circle, the politician from Illinois became president and Seward served as his secretary of state.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/if-not-hillary-who-1114??src=rss
They say she has cleared the field because that's what political pros get paid to say, but they also say it as a kind of supplication to the gods of political chance, because there is one thing that people in the party try very hard not to talk about these days, something that remains unspoken for the same reason that theater people do not say Macbeth and baseball players never mention a no-hitter in progress.
...
It is not cowardice if it can be sold as shrewd calculation. And it can be sold as shrewd calculation, because that is the way wisdom becomes conventional, and the more conventional it becomes, the less wise it is. After all, in the spring of 1991, President George H. W. Bush, the conqueror of the Levant, had an approval rating of 80 by-God percent. This scared away most of whom were perceived to be on the Democratic party's A-list, including Andrew Cuomo's father, from challenging him. The elder Bush had cleared both fields, they said. One of the few people who stepped up was the governor of Arkansas, who put together a renegade staff that outhustled the Republicans for two years and got the governor of Arkansas, and his sharp lawyer of a wife, elected president. Some people look at a cleared field and see a place where there is limitless room to run.
...
Which brings us to the conventional contrarianism that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is more conventional than it is contrary. The speculation goes this way: Clinton had the same advantages in 2008 that she has today, with the exception of her subsequently having been secretary of state. She had first call on staff, on contributors, and on the spotlight. And she spent two years getting beaten to the punch and utterly wrong-footed by the renegade staff of a junior senator from Illinois that had a better handle on the prevailing zeitgeist and a far superior knowledge of the new communication technology and how best to put it to political use, and that got the senator from Illinois elected president. To make an easy historical parallel, Hillary Clinton in 2007 was William Seward in 1859, a senator from New York whose pockets were bulging with IOU's and who was a power in the party and its presumptive presidential nominee. Seward led the race all the way through two ballots at the 1860 Republican convention until he and his people got outmaneuvered by a judge named David Davis and the people working on behalf of a politician from Illinois whose speeches had galvanized the nation but whose political résumé was painfully limited to one term in Congress. Ultimately, of course, and to close the historical circle, the politician from Illinois became president and Seward served as his secretary of state.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/if-not-hillary-who-1114??src=rss
40 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
but I do wish Elizabeth Warren/ Bernie Sanders as a candidate(s). Given the corporate money driven nature of our political process, yeah, who other but hillary....
Representative Alan Grayson
will bre a fascinating next couple of years.
I espcially like how Pierce broadened his metaphor of 'clearing the fields' to talk about the Republicans as a "field of locusts." I think I've met my match in hatred of the Republicans! 
and, as George Carlin said, average people ain't in the club
HRC with famous war criminal:
HRC with famous Wall Street criminal (Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman):
Let there be an end to this goddamn plague of Clintons and Bushes. 
