On the flight from Washington to New Hampshire to cover Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate, I was joined by a Hillary Clinton staffer who was headed to Hanover to prep her for the encounter with her seven rivals. "I expect fireworks," he said, anticipating that the challengers would try to shake up the race at one of the last confrontations before the January voting.

It didn’t happen. There were several jabs — from Joe Biden, John Edwards, Bill Richardson and Mike Gravel– but Barack Obama, who is her closest pursuer in the polls, had lost his voice to a bad cold and mostly stood mute. And Clinton smothered every question with a blanket of conditional responses, so reluctant to take a clear stand that she frustrated NBC’s Tim Russert, the designated questioner at the two-hour MSNBC talkathon.

Her posture during the debate was the classic front-runner pose: Don’t make waves. The question is whether she can go through the next three months saying little or nothing without jeopardizing her lead in the contest.

The highly regarded Granite State Poll released just before the debate showed Clinton had expanded that advantage, drawing 43 percent of the support, compared to 20 percent for Obama, 12 percent for Edwards and 6 percent for Richardson.

During the debate, she rarely came out of a defensive crouch, as if determined to protect her favored position. Answering the first question, she said her goal would be to withdraw all American troops from Iraq by 2013, but "it is very difficult to know what we are going to be inheriting" from the Bush administration, so she cannot make any pledge — as Richardson and others feel free to do. Troops might be needed for counterterrorism work for many years.

Angering utter long-shot Gravel and disagreeing with Biden and Chris Dodd, she voted earlier on Wednesday for Sen. Joe Lieberman’s resolution designating Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. Edwards claimed that President Bush could use that as a pretext for war and said that it showed Clinton had not learned the lesson of her "mistake" in authorizing the use of force in Iraq. But she calmly replied that the Revolutionary Guards had provided weapons to kill Americans in Iraq and promoted terrorism — so the designation was justified.

When Russert asked what her attitude would be toward an Israeli strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, she refused to answer such a "hypothetical." He insisted it was a real possibility, but she would not play. Instead, she endorsed the recent Israeli attack on Syria — a safe stand.

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HENS CACKLE. So do witches. And, so does the front-runner in the Democratic presidential contest.

Former Bill Clinton adviser Dick Morris recently described Hillary Clinton’s laugh as "loud, inappropriate, and mirthless. . . . A scary sound that was somewhere between a cackle and a screech." Politico’s Ben Smith referred to Clinton’s "signature cackle." Conservative radio hosts routinely play Clinton’s "cackle" on their radio shows.

Yet according to a new poll, the cackler is leading her closest competitor in New Hampshire by 20 points. As a result, her challengers made her their target during last week’s Hanover, N.H., debate.

Any woman who has ever been the only female in the room knows the guys are always waiting for that perfect moment - the one that makes the woman look silly, stupid, weepy or best of all, witchy. The men running against Clinton are still waiting for such an opportunity.

So far, all they have to work with is her laugh. The cackler is smooth, well-scripted, and undeterred by their now-familiar attacks.

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The aura of inevitability surrounding Hillary Clinton’s White House candidacy isn’t as bright as it once was. The vivid carrot-colored pant suit she sported while debating her Democratic opponents at Dartmouth College on Wednesday shined brighter than her candidacy, which has lost a bit of its luster as potential vulnerabilities have surfaced.

Campaigns are narratives. They tell a story and, to a certain extent, Clinton has been able to direct her narrative by keeping Democrats focused on her electability. The danger that arises when a candidate rides that one-legged stool is that it is easy to topple.

She hasn’t fallen yet, but as the campaign wears on she will have to provide Democrats with more than she has provided so far. If not, she may find herself struggling to balance as her opponents and the press begin pushing and shoving.

Case in point.

A private memo leaked to The Washington Post, which came from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake’s firm, indicated that recent polling of "31 swing congressional districts" revealed that Clinton’s polarizing persona could cost her the 2008 election and could hurt other Democrats who might appear with her on the ballot.

The memo provided details that seem to challenge one of the major prevailing assumptions from this early campaign. It indicated that Democrats faced a "sobering picture" that George W. Bush’s abysmal ratings are not a guarantee that Democrats will take the White House. The advantage that Democrats enjoyed over Republicans in the generic ballot melted away when pollsters began naming specific candidates.

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U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut questioned on Friday the electability of Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton, saying she sports a confrontational brand of politics that turns off voters.

While Clinton, a senator from New York and wife of the former president, can probably win the general election, Dodd said, "I think people want to move on. The melodrama and all, we need to get behind us."

Dodd, who trails her in polls by a large margin, said the country is tired of continued fighting involving the Clintons and their political foes in the Republican Party.

"Isn’t it time the country came together and we started solving … problems? If it’s just about a fight, a never-ending fight, the country is so turned off to that. They want leadership that will bridge those divides and bring us together as a people," he said on a taping of "Iowa Press," to be shown at 11:30 a.m. Sunday on Iowa Public Television.

Dodd expects the presidential election to be close - not a cakewalk for Democrats as some people assume. That’s all the more reason why electability is important, he said, touting his three decades of experience in Congress and an ability to get things done.

Dodd noted that party rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards have much less experience.

He chastised them and Clinton for saying during a debate Wednesday night they can’t guarantee a pullout of all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of the next presidential term in 2013.

"The others are not doing enough to lead" on the issue, said Dodd.

On another topic, the Senate Banking Committee chairman said the housing meltdown and credit crunch affecting much of the country could end in a recession.

"I think it’s very bad and it could go a lot worse," Dodd said.

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Hillary Clinton just dropped the universal health care bomb that everyone knew was coming. "I intend to have a universal health care system that does three things — lowers costs for everybody, improves quality for everybody and covers everybody."

Well, maybe. But not here on planet Earth.

In fact, a cursory scan of the Western Hemisphere shows that Britain, Canada and other nations with socialized medicine have all made similar promises — and consistently failed to deliver.

Hillary’s plan requires mandatory participation by everyone in a government system that goes under the euphemism of an "individual mandate."

This "mandate" is nothing more than a law forcing people to acquire insurance — either through the government or private sector. The program would require massive federal outlays. Sen. Clinton claims it would cost $110 billion per year, although that number would surely skyrocket. It would be financed through higher taxes.

Sen. Clinton also would require all employers to offer health insurance to their employees or contribute to a government-run insurance pool. Small businesses would receive subsidies. And people would have the option of enrolling in a government-operated plan if they did not want private insurance.

America spends more on health care than other countries, but that’s why the U.S. system works without waiting lists and rationing. We receive the best treatments available, which is why our survival rates for most life-threatening diseases — including the four most common types of cancer — are the highest in the world.

In America now, the poor are already insured by Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Nevertheless, Sen. Clinton claims that we need a government takeover of the health care system because 47 million Americans remain uninsured. But that’s a grossly misleading figure.

The Census Bureau’s estimate of 47 million "uninsured" is based on a survey question that asks the respondents if they "were not covered by any type of health insurance at any time in that year."

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Former President Bill Clinton said he was far more experienced when he made his successful 1992 White House run than Senator Barack Obama is today.

“There is a difference,” Clinton said in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” that will air this weekend. “I was the senior governor in America. I had been head of any number of national organizations that were related to the major issue of the day, which is how to restore America’s economic strength.”

Clinton was 46 in 1992 when he beat Republican President George H.W. Bush to win the highest U.S. office, the same age that Obama is now. When Clinton, then the Arkansas governor, was first running, “he was initially dismissed as an obscure if colorful outsider, handsome and articulate but, at age 46, too young and inexperienced for the job,” his wife Hillary wrote in her autobiography, “Living History.”

Today, New York Senator Hillary Clinton, 59, is the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination and her closest rival is Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois who previously served in the state legislature and worked as a community organizer in Chicago.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign has emphasized her record as first lady and in the U.S. Senate as a way of highlighting Obama’s relative lack of experience.

Memo

After a July 23 debate, her campaign put out a memo criticizing Obama for saying he would agree to meet with dictators without precondition in his first year in office. During the debate, Clinton said she would refuse to do so because such meetings could be used as propaganda.

“Hillary Clinton distinguished herself and showed that she has the strength and experience to be the next president,” her campaign said. Clinton later told the Quad-City Times that Obama’s comments were `irresponsible and frankly naive.”

Still, her husband’s comments were the Clinton camp’s most pointed and direct to date on Obama’s level of experience.

Obama, for his part, has fashioned himself as the agent of change in the race, emphasizing in speeches that he hasn’t adopted “the ways of Washington.”

Experience

Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said today that his candidate has “over two decades of the experience America needs.”

“He can change the divisive politics of Washington because he’s the one candidate who’s spent his career bringing people of differing views together,” Burton said.

One of Obama’s best-known supporters, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, in August dismissed the experience comparison, saying, “Being a former first lady doesn’t prepare you to be president.”

Bill Clinton, 61, said Obama’s experience today is closer to his own in 1988, when he decided not to pursue a White House run. “I came within a day of announcing, because most of the governors were for me and I had been a governor for six years,” Clinton said in the interview taped in New York. “And I really didn’t think I knew enough and had served enough and done enough to run.”

Obama has the added difficulty that the international situation is more complicated today, with the threat of terrorism and the war in Iraq, than it was in 1992, Clinton said.

Post Cold War

At that time, the most pressing international issue “was how to build a post-Cold War world,” he said. “We didn’t have the terror threat. We didn’t have the troops in Iraq. We didn’t have the Afghan issue hanging fire.”

When he campaigns for his wife, Bill Clinton highlights her experience as a widely traveled first lady who focused on health- care policy during her husband’s administration and now works on the Armed Services Committee as a second-term senator. That experience is critical as the U.S. needs to pursue foreign alliances, build up the military, disengage from Iraq and handle a variety of domestic issues, he said.

“What America needs in a president changes from time to time,” Clinton said in the Bloomberg Television interview. “Her experience is more relevant and more compelling.”

Source:  Bloomberg.com

Bill Clinton is showing no inclination to disclose the names of the people whose sizable donations helped construct his $165 million presidential library.

In a surreal moment during Wednesday night’s Democratic debate, Hillary Rodham Clinton was asked about the fact that her husband’s foundation and library refuse to disclose the names of the people who have chipped in, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars — any of whom might want to curry favor with the family of the next president. Moderator Tim Russert asked why her husband had not voluntarily made the donor list public even if the law does not require it, given the potential for conflict.

"You’ll have to ask them," said the senator from New York.

"What’s your recommendation?" Russert asked.

"Well, I don’t talk about my private conversations with my husband," she responded.

Clinton Library officials and his personal spokesman did not return repeated calls, but NBC News caught up with the former president in New York yesterday, where he was hosting a news conference about his Global Initiative.

"If she becomes president, I will treat it as if we are covered by that, and I will disclose all the donors to our library and activities," he told the network. But that will not apply to those who have already donated, he said.

"For the people that have already given me money, I don’t think I should disclose it unless there is some conflict of which I am aware, and there is not."

What little is known about the financing of the Clinton Library was reported in the New York Sun. The reporter found the donor names on a touch-screen computer mounted on a wall on the third floor of the library, shortly after it opened in 2004. The computer was removed soon after the article appeared. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette followed with a more complete list the next year.

Among the names that surfaced were a range of foreign donors, including the Saudi royal family, Kuwait, Brunei and the Embassy of Qatar. Foreigners are not permitted to make campaign donations, but there are no rules in place about who can give to a presidential library.

There were several figures who have factored into stories about the Clintons’ fundraising. For instance, Patricia Hotung, the wife of Hong Kong businessman Eric Hotung, was a library donor. In 1997, they were also in the news because Patricia Hotung donated $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee shortly after her husband was granted a meeting with Clinton’s top national security advisers.

Source:  The Washington Post

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 "baby bond" from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

Clinton, her party’s front-runner in the 2008 race, made the suggestion during a forum hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus.

"I like the idea of giving every baby born in America a $5,000 account that will grow over time, so that when that young person turns 18 if they have finished high school they will be able to access it to go to college or maybe they will be able to make that downpayment on their first home," she said.

The New York senator did not offer any estimate of the total cost of such a program or how she would pay for it. Approximately 4 million babies are born each year in the United States.

Clinton said such an account program would help Americans get back to the tradition of savings that she remembers as a child, and has become harder to accomplish in the face of rising college and housing costs.

She argued that wealthy people "get to have all kinds of tax incentives to save, but most people can’t afford to do that."

The proposal was met with enthusiastic applause at an event aimed to encourage young people to excel and engage in politics.

"I think it’s a wonderful idea," said Rep. Stephanie Stubbs Jones, an Ohio Democrat who attended the event and has already endorsed Clinton. "Every child born in the United States today owes $27,000 on the national debt, why not let them come get $5,000 to grow until their 18?"

Britain launched a similar program in January 2005, handing out vouchers worth hundreds of dollars each to parents with children born after Sept. 1, 2002.

Earlier this month, Time magazine proposed a $5,000 baby bond program.

Source:  SFGate.com

From Nuke’s News

From HuffPo, David Mizner says “Hillary Hates You”:

She thinks you’re weak. She has no respect for you, and her lack of respect amounts to loathing–the kind of loathing that the powerful feel for the powerless. She’s confident that progressives are too impotent, divided, and disorganized to deny her the nomination.

How else to explain her vote for the Lieberman-Kyl Amendment, which designates “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps as a foreign terrorist organization”? Do the math, people: the Revolution Guards are terrorists + Bush launched a global war on terror = _____. Jim Webb called the bill “Cheney’s fondest pipe dream.” Recall that “real men want to go to Tehran.”

Her vote tells you that she’s cocikly crusing toward the nomination that the press has already awarded her. Her chief advisor, Mark “union buster” Penn has crunched the numbers and told her that she can defy the core beliefs of the party’s core with impunity. She can prepare for the general election and focus on money and do AIPAC’s bidding and still win the nomination. [snip]

Edwards has carved out an important difference on national security. Unlike Clinton, he opposes the very concept of a global war against terrorism. And unlike Clinton, he backed the Webb Amendment, which would have made it a crime for Bush to attack Iran without Congressional authorization–a position that won Edwards no friends at AIPAC, which killed a similar measure in the House. And unlike Clinton, who would give Bush the 92,000 new troops he wants, Edwards isn’t committed to making our monstrous military more monstrous. Huge issues, real differences.

Hillary thinks you won’t pay attention to the differences, just as she thinks she can get away with casting a pro-war vote in the middle of the race for the Democratic nomination. John Edwards hopes she’s wrong.

Core beliefs of the party = our monstrous military???

I haven’t read anything from this writer before, so I don’t know whether he is one who appends each anti-war screed with, “but I support the troops,” or not. At this point, it is very clear to me that the Halloween masks have come off, and “anti-war” is self-evidently “anti-military.”

If Mizner and his fellow lefty bloggers have any guts, just click here, here, here, here, here,and here. There’s enough ammo there to keep Hillary from getting your party’s nomination. C’mon Dave: No guts, no glory, eh?

Source: Nuke’s News

Democratic strategists are cringing and conservatives are salivating at the thought of 2008 U.S. House elections if Hillary Clinton leads the Democrat ticket. A poll conducted by the Democratic Party and leaked to the media shows Hillary Clinton trailing Rudolph Giuliani by 10% in a general election matchup in key swing districts, while Barack Obama is effectively tied with Giuliani among the same voters. Aside from the dire concerns about Hillary Clinton’s own electability, the Democratic Party has good reason to be concerned about its presidential candidates’ popularity in “swing districts” and not just “swing states”…

Fresh off their convincing victory in the Congressional elections of 2006, Democrats are anxious to defend their majorities in the House and Senate. Democrats hold only the narrowest lead in the Senate, but here things look good for the blue team in 2008 - Republicans are stuck defending a larger number of seats, and these include some vulnerable incumbents. In the House, the Democrats’ 31 seat advantage might seem to offer breathing room, but here the Democrats must defend some fragile 2006 gains in Republican-leaning districts, and here is where the “down ticket effect” comes into play. It’s fairly obvious that each party’s presidential nominee can influence the fortunes of their Congressional, state, and local candidates - not only do they represent their party in a very public way, they also have a strong effect in determining who shows up to vote. A Democratic candidate who energizes the party’s base (as Obama or Edwards might) can mean extra votes down the ticket for other races, while a nominee who is strongly disliked by Republicans (like Hillary Clinton) will guarantee a sky-high Republican turnout even in the absence of a strong GOP candidate.

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