Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Evan Bayh was never going to set the world on fire-- his name has been showing up on lists for too long. If he was going to run, he would have run sometime before this. That said, I'm not so sure that it all comes down to Barack Obama and the junior senator from New York. Edwards is an intriguing thought, for one thing. He hung in to the bitter end last time, and might do it again this go-round. I have a nagging suspicion that he was deliberately under-used by the Kerry campaign, perhaps because Kerry was concerned about being over-shadowed, or maybe because Kerry didn't want to make Edwards the heir apparent. Kerry still might run, and he has a case: he got more votes than any other losing candidate in history, after all. I am inclined to think that coming in second is like losing the Super Bowl; as John Elway observed it doesn't mean you are the second best team, it means you are the worst. Even so, Kerry has demonstrated that he is tough to kill.
I like the idea of Hillary Clinton better than the reality, I'm afraid. She voted for this awful war, and I can't get past that. This morning on NPR she brushed it off: "If I knew then what we know now". At best the is begging the question, but I'm afraid that it is probably worse. Like just about every other Senator (sorry Lincoln Chaffee-- you were right) I think she was afraid to go on record against a popular president, and popular opinion. As I have said in the past, as the Senator from New York this was a free vote-- even if things had gone differently, New Yorkers wouldn't have punished her for voting against the war. She was voting for Iowa, unfortunately. I have yet to see anything that would have changed my view of the situation in Iraq at that time, and it is pretty clear that the evidence really amounted to Colin Powell's PowerPoint. Since that wasn't good enough to convince the UN, I can't think of why it should have been good enough to persuade the United States Senate-- and that, to my mind, puts anyone who voted for the war pretty much off my list. If there were some other accomplishment that Senator Clinton could point to it might change my mind about her, but I'm not seeing anything.
There's no shortage of Democrats that want to be president. I watched a little of Joe Biden last night-- he'll be around. There'll be others.
I like the idea of Hillary Clinton better than the reality, I'm afraid. She voted for this awful war, and I can't get past that. This morning on NPR she brushed it off: "If I knew then what we know now". At best the is begging the question, but I'm afraid that it is probably worse. Like just about every other Senator (sorry Lincoln Chaffee-- you were right) I think she was afraid to go on record against a popular president, and popular opinion. As I have said in the past, as the Senator from New York this was a free vote-- even if things had gone differently, New Yorkers wouldn't have punished her for voting against the war. She was voting for Iowa, unfortunately. I have yet to see anything that would have changed my view of the situation in Iraq at that time, and it is pretty clear that the evidence really amounted to Colin Powell's PowerPoint. Since that wasn't good enough to convince the UN, I can't think of why it should have been good enough to persuade the United States Senate-- and that, to my mind, puts anyone who voted for the war pretty much off my list. If there were some other accomplishment that Senator Clinton could point to it might change my mind about her, but I'm not seeing anything.
There's no shortage of Democrats that want to be president. I watched a little of Joe Biden last night-- he'll be around. There'll be others.
// posted by Bill @ 9:03 AM 
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