Out of the Hillary fog bank, comes a voice of reason in the form of Bob Scheer’s Truthdig blog. He says what every politician knows: Hillary is the Democrats’ stealth war candidate.
Let’s face it: No matter how much many of us who oppose the war in Iraq would also love to elect a female president, Hillary Clinton is not a peace candidate. She is an unrepentant hawk, à la Joe Lieberman. She believed invading Iraq was a good idea, all available evidence to the contrary, and she has, once again, made it clear that she still does.
“If the most important thing to any of you is choosing someone who did not cast a vote [to authorize the war] or has said his vote was a mistake, then there are others to choose from,” she said in New Hampshire last week, confusing contempt for antiwar Americans — now a majority — with the courage of her indefensible conviction that she bears no responsibility for the humanitarian, economic and military disaster our occupation has wrought.
Read the whole thing here.
This election already is resembling 2004: Moneybags Hillary coming out of the Democratic Leadership Council, as the candidate of the middle class, i.e. status quo. Like Lieberman before her, Hillary is ranked against the so-called left. In 2004 the DLC gang saw Howard Dean as the commie slime. (Dean,of course, is a conservative doctor whose major left wing interest as Vermont governor was providiing children with health care.) But much to the chagrin of the rightwing Dems, Dean is still hanging around. He can be a real pain in the ass. As head of the Democratic National Committee, he knows where the bodies are buried in the Dem garbage dump.
Obama remains a curiosity in all this. The one person who actually might win the election for the Dems is John Edwards. He was a DLCer in 2004, but appears to have shaken off the deadly soccer mom image and is flirting with populist notions. Then there’s Gore, who almost surely will get a pat on the back from Oscar for his climate movie and could turn out to be the Hollywood candidate. If that’s the case, Gore will have money to fight Hillary.
