Muttering at Hillary Clinton's coronation

Muttering at Hillary Clinton's coronation

By Toby Harnden
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 06/10/2007

This has been the week of Hillary the Inevitable. She has broken the political equivalent of the sound barrier by surging past the 50 per cent mark in a national poll. Her fundraising is now outstripping that of Barack Obama, the Young Pretender. Rival political operatives are awestruck by the efficiency of her campaign.

But are the Democrats already experiencing buyer's remorse? "I've contributed to her in the past, I think she'd be a million times better than Bush but I don't like this coronation," one major party donor told me with a grimace at an Embassy Row function. "Maybe it's the dynasty thing. Maybe it's the control factor. Maybe it's just that she doesn't feel like change to me."

The American commentariat has simultaneously crowned the former First Lady and begun pelting her with rotten fruit. At a private gathering of pundits and pollsters recently, all nine declared in a straw poll that Mrs Clinton would win not only the Democratic nomination but the White House as well.

Then columnists from The New York Times, that most reliable bastion of the liberal establishment, formed the vanguard of an assault against her. "Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar (an elite college founded for women)," sniffed Maureen Dowd.

Her colleague Gail Collins wrote of Mrs Clinton's talent for knowing "how to string together the maximum number of weasel words in one sentence".

more...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml;jsessionid=UT0ILZUJ5MFLJQFIQMGSFF4AVCBQWIV0?xml=/opinion/2007/10/06/do0604.xml

Would be labeled coronation...

"By attacking Mrs Clinton, moreover, the Republicans may be helping her against Mr Obama and John Edwards in the primaries. As well as building her up in the eyes of Democrats, the attacks from the Right make it difficult for her party rivals to assail her without sounding as though they are using Republican talking points.



It may seem to be all over bar the voting. But the campaign still has months to run and elections have a nasty habit of upsetting both conventional wisdom and the best-laid plans"

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