It is the curse of Clintonism that it is associated with the Clintons.

A centrist-oriented Democratic politics that is pragmatic and economically literate is better than the alternatives: a fluffy politics of hope (Barack Obama) and angry politics of anti-corporate zeal (John Edwards). At least on paper.

For the champions of this otherwise preferable approach are Bill and Hillary Clinton. As individuals, they have their strengths and weaknesses, as do any talented, but flawed, politicians; as a team, they tend to be a roiling mess, with something to repel everyone lately.

Bill has supplemented Hillary’s tightly wound discipline with his out-of-control ego, her off-putting devotion to script with his wild and dishonest improvisations, her inability to project warmth with his self-adoring affability. What they have always held in common is ambition and willingness to resort to any means — sheathed in self-righteousness — to achieve power.

Throughout the 1990s, their attacks were directed at people who were vulnerable by virtue of their status as allegedly self-interested women accusing Bill of misconduct, or as conservative politicians hated by the press, or as special prosecutors whose work was distasteful to the public. They all turn out to have been easier targets than Obama, a winsome African-American liberal.

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There has been much speculation that if Hillary Clinton wins the Democratic nomination for President (a less certain bet today than a few months back though still likely), she will choose a running mate with a military background.  Virginia Senator Jim Webb and former General Wesley Clark are two former military men who have been prominently mentioned. But both have suffered from bouts of foot-in-mouth disease.  A far more obvious and smarter choice, if this is the path that Clinton chooses to go, would be former Nebraska Governor and Senator Bob Kerrey.* 

And there is at least some evidence that such a move may be in the works.
Earlier this year, Nebraska’s maverick Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, announced that he would not seek re-election to the Senate (running as a VP with Michael Bloomberg on a third party ticket may have some appeal however). The Democrat most capable of winning this open seat would be Bob Kerrey, now the President of the New School in New York. But Kerrey flirted with running for the Senate for a few weeks, and then bowed out. 
One possible explanation for his decision not to run was that Mike Johanns, the popular former Republican Governor, later appointed Agriculture Secretary by President Bush, had entered the race for the GOP nomination.  In Presidential election years, Nebraska typically votes 60% or more for the GOP nominee. It would require a lot of ticket switching for a Democrat to win a Senate race.  This has happened before: Democrat Ben Nelson won an open senate seat in 2000 by 51% to 49%, while George Bush won the state’s 5 Electoral College votes by a 29% margin (62% to 33%) over Al Gore. 
While Kerrey would have been an even bet or better against any other GOP nominee, against Johanns he would have started out as an underdog. So it may have been a simple electoral calculus that led Kerrey to bow out. But what if the reason Kerrey decided not to run for the Senate is that he got a call asking  him if he wanted to return to Washington in a different capacity, namely as Vice President?
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Hillary Clinton has no right to complain that her friends and flatterers in the media are rough on her. But when Clintons hit rough passages on the road to victory, this is what Clintons do: complain. That’s too meek. They whine.

But she obviously feels wronged by the news media when her polls begin to slip and she looks at her Barack Obama’s worshipful press clips. In fairy-tale terms, Obama is Snow White, and Hillary is the vain and wicked queen peering into the mirror and demanding to know "who is the fairest of them all?"

She can easily come to a boil over Time’s Obama cover on the December 10 issue, where Obama stands in a heroic pose with arms folded, surrounded by a glow that makes him look like a saintly icon. She can wince as he’s cast as both a greater force for idealism and target of discrimination, while she’s merely part of "machine" politics. On ABC, morning anchor Chris "Son of Mario" Cuomo asked Obama "What do you think the bigger obstacle is for you in becoming president, the Clinton campaign machine or America’s inherent racism?"

In other words, America doesn’t deserve glowing Saint Barack – unless, of course, we all vote for him to demonstrate eagerly and apologetically that we reject our inherent prejudices. But this is where we go back to the underlying silliness of Hillary’s whining, that any Democrat would complain that they face a fierce media stuffed with Cuomos, Russerts, Stephanopouloses, and other former Democratic aides and family members.

Hillary’s complain of a harsh media microscope appeared in The Washington Post on December 19. Media reporter Howard Kurtz used Time editor-at-large Mark Halperin to act as Hillary’s unofficial press secretary. "She’s just held to a different standard in every respect," sulked Halperin. "The press rooted for Obama to go negative, and when he did he was applauded. When she does it, it’s treated as this huge violation of propriety." While Clinton’s mistakes deserve full coverage, Halperin says, "the press’s flaws — wild swings, accentuating the negative — are magnified 50 times when it comes to her. It’s not a level playing field."

When conservatives make a case for media bias to a liberal, it’s important (in fact, it’s absolutely imperative) that they deliver factual evidence examples — quotes, studies, surveys, you name it. (And it’s never enough in the eyes of the press.) But if you’re a liberal, particularly a liberal in the media, and you want to accuse the press of tacking left, it’s acceptable just to pull wild figures out of the air. Her flaws are "magnified 50 times"? What media outlet is he following? Or is he reading someone else’s talking points?

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As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jawboned the president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.

But during those two terms in the White House, Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti or Rwanda. And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal dragged on.

In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her "eight years with a front-row seat on history."

Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency, and on the campaign trail have increasingly been challenging her assertions of unique experience. Senator Barack Obama has especially questioned "what experiences she’s claiming" as first lady, noting that the job is not the same as being a cabinet member, much less president. And last Friday, he suggested that more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration were supporting his candidacy than hers. (Hillary Clinton quickly released a list of 80 who were supporting her.)

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As told in two MSM stories. The first, on MSNBC, says she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker in the Clinton White House.

Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.

Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.

The other, in Newsweek, seems to agree that policy wasn’t her forte. Gender politics was front and center, though.

Hillary oversaw the hiring of White House staffers and pressed her husband to fill half the top positions with women. In particular, she insisted he choose a woman as attorney general, which led to the derailed nominations of corporate lawyer Zoe Baird and federal Judge Kimba Wood. The president finally settled on Janet Reno, who had been recommended by Hillary’s brother Hugh Rodham. “I don’t think Clinton believed he had a choice,” recalled Dee Dee Myers, his press secretary. “He had painted himself into a corner, and he had to appoint a woman.” Hillary was equally adamant that the president appoint her friend Madeleine Albright as secretary of State.

So we have Hillary to blame for this?

And that note is reinforced by this.

Mrs. Clinton said in the interview that she was careful not to overstep her bounds on national security, relying instead on informal access. During the preinaugural transition, for instance, she sat in on some meetings about presidential appointments at the invitation of Warren Christopher, who directed the transition and became secretary of state in the first Clinton term. Participants recalled that she would mostly speak when Mr. Christopher called on her, and tended to make points about placing more women, minority members and allies in key jobs.

That’s a very shallow view of foreign policy, to say the least. If she had had more of substance to say, surely some of those who were there then and are supporting her now would recall it.

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It’s a miracle!

Hillary got a "surprise" visit from her Sunday School teacher from the Chicago area while she spoke in Donnellson, Iowa. (Screengrab-AP)

It looks like Hillary’s Jesus moment was likely another staged event for the Democratic front runner.
The New York Daily News reported:

Clinton called on two audience members for questions, including Amy Fellows of Croton, Iowa, who asked, “Are you a Christian?”

“Yes I am,” said Hillary.

“OK, that’s really important to me. God be with you,” said Crofton.

“And also with you,” the senator answered. “I’m often asked what are the biggest influences in my life and what are the important commitments that kind of keep me going — my faith, my family, my friends, my work. I used to get asked fairly often if I was a praying person. I said yes, I was raised going to church, I’m a Methodist,” she said to applause. “I’m a very grateful and committed Methodist.”

Fellows told our pool reporter (Pat Healy, for the curious) later that she was not a part of the Clinton campaign and that the question was not planted.

“Having a good Christian in the White House is very important to me,” she said, adding she was leaning strongly towards Clinton, but didn’t know very much about John Edwards or Obama, including their religions or the brouhaha over Obama’s faith and Kerrey’s comments.

Also among the 200 people at the Donnellson firehouse was Rosalie Bentzinger, who was the director of religious education Hillary’s First Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Ill. She gave Hillary a picture of her confirmation class from March 22, 1959.

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By Chadwick Matlin

presidentbillclinton.com or williamclinton.com redirects right to Barack Obama’s homepage. This is the same Obama that Bill Clinton hasn’t been too fond of recently. We’ve heard rumors of dissention within the Clinton ranks, but has it really gotten this bad?

No. Those Clinton domains were registered in 1998 by Joseph Culligan, a private investigator and part-time domain squatter based in Miami. Last week, after ABC News discovered Clinton was readying an Obama attack site, Culligan was inspired to drum up publicity for his own private investigation Web site, webofdeception.com. He redirected the Clinton domains, which had lay dormant for years, to Obama’s site, hoping that somebody would take the bait.

Well, it worked. Wonkette published a post on the redirects today, which piqued our interest on an unsurprisingly slow news day. I tracked the domains back to Culligan, who also owns domains based on the names of Barack Obama and Patti Solis Doyle, Hillary’s campaign manager.

Domain-name trickery is nothing new on the Internet. Just last week somebody tried to convince journalists that Hillary Clinton registered BarackOsama2008.org. But Culligan’s antics are an avoidable headache for the Clinton camp. Culligan says he doesn’t hold any animosity toward the Clintons and that 42 “was a great president.” (He wouldn’t say which candidate, Democrat or Republican, he supports.) He has offered to give Clinton the domains every year since ‘98, free of charge, but he’s never heard a response. “When Clinton is ready for his name, I’m ready to give it back."

Source:  Slate.com

Hillary Clinton predicted Saturday that just electing her President will cut the price of oil.

When the world hears her commitment at her inauguration about ending American dependence on foreign fuel, Clinton says, oil-pumping countries will lower prices to stifle America’s incentive to develop alternative energy.

"I predict to you, the oil-producing countries will drop the price of oil," Clinton said, speaking at the Manchester YWCA. "They will once again assume, once the cost pressure is off, Americans and our political process will recede."

Clinton argued that former President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s actually started moving in the right direction toward energy independence, but his successor, Ronald Reagan, "dismantled" that work.

"Because costs were low, people didn’t care, didn’t complain," she said.

She warned that folks shouldn’t be grateful now if oil countries cut prices from near $100 a barrel to $60 or $70, and compared it to trying to boil a frog.

"You put him in hot water, it jumps right out, you put him in cold water and turn up the heat - he’s a goner," she said. "We’ve got to figure out how were going to not be the frog in the cold water anymore."

Source: NY Daily News

You can accuse the Hillary Clinton campaign of a lot of things, but overconfidence is not one of them. Not in Iowa. Not anymore.

Orders have come from the top of the campaign here that nobody is to predict that Hillary Clinton will win Iowa.

That may be part of the “expectations” game that all campaigns play.

Or it may be because the campaign no longer is really sure that Clinton will win.

In interviews with top Clinton staffers, who did not wish to be quoted directly, I was told that Clinton could survive a second-place finish in Iowa and that the state was not do-or-die for her.

Gordon Fischer, the former chair of the Iowa Democratic Party who is now backing Obama, says that attitude represents an “evolution.”

“The strong pitch made to me and others not that long ago was that we had to be for Hillary, because Hillary was going to be the inevitable winner,” Fischer told me. “They have come a long way if they now think Iowa is just survivable.”

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By Dick Morris and Eileen McGann

Recently, as only Hillary can do, she claimed that she was “deeply involved in the Irish peace process.” Bill has also picked up the theme, citing her “independent” role in resolving the century-old conflict as “experience” with which to justify a White House run.

How odd that Hillary forgot to mention her pivotal role in Ireland just four years ago, when she wrote her $8 million memoir, Living History. There, she told a very different story.

Her first mention of Ireland was in a discussion of Bill’s October 2004 trip:

“The trip highlighted Bill’s milestones in foreign affairs. In addition to his pivotal role in easing the tensions in the Middle East, he was now focusing on the decades Long Troubles in Northern Ireland.” (Emphasis added)

No memories of her own involvement in the Irish “troubles.”

Ireland next appeared in Hillary’s memoirs in 1995, when the Clintons visited Belfast and Dublin. According to Hillary, while Bill met with the “various factions” of Irish politics, Hillary met with women leaders of the peace movement. Rather than discuss the difficulties of the peace process, Hillary focused on a teapot used by the women:

“They poured tea from ordinary stainless steel teapots, and when I remarked how well they kept the tea warm, Joyce insisted that I take a pot to remember them by. I used that dented teapot every day in our small family kitchen in the White House…”

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