Billary Revisits a Tactic from 2004
One of the plot lines of the ongoing drama between Barack and Hillary is that Bill and Hillary (a.k.a. Billary) are trying to destroy Obama so that when, or, increasingly, if, he becomes the nominee, he will lose to John McCain. "We told you so," Billary will say, as they immediately lay the groundwork for Hillary, who will then be 64, to be the "inevitable" candidate in 2012.
Is this a variation on the tactic the Clintons reportedly tried last time around? While doing interviews for my book on Bill's post presidency, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House, several of my sources mentioned Billary's work pushing General Wesley Clark for the nomination in 2004. The Clintons, according to this plot, knew that Clark, the retired NATO supreme allied commander, could not win. Bush would win in 2004 and Hillary would have an easy path to the nomination in 2008.
Billary was right about Clark. When he finally did enter the race for the nomination, he was a remarkably inept candidate, admitting he had voted for Reagan in 1980 and Bush in 1988, pushing the rumor that John Kerry had a relationship with a young staffer (Kerry's daughter, Vanessa, said she almost died laughing when she read the pulsating headline on the Drudge Report.). The rumor soon died and so did Clark's campaign.
"We were sure that the Clinton crowd had put Wesley Clark in the race, encouraged him to get into the race," said one of Kerry's top finance people. Close associates of the Clintons became involved, including Terry McAuliffe, friend, moneyman and handpicked DNC head after Bill left the White House. (McAuliffe later groused about being so shut out of the inner circle of the Kerry campaign that he was never invited to the headquarters.) Billary's friend of three decades, Eli Segal, became Clark's campaign chairman.
General Clark had hired the son of Don Fowler, a former head of the DNC and a power in South Carolina, to run the campaign, "These people from Clinton campaign came in and pushed my son out," Fowler says. Although Bill was said to be orchestrating things, spending hours on the telephone trying to jumpstart the Clark campaign, Fowler, who is now supporting Hillary, does not see Machiavellis here, just the Clintons needing a safe harbor from the storm of the democratic primary and settling for the moment on Clark. "That was just an easy place for them to be and to stay out of the fray."
Once Clark "imploded," which was what he said was going to happen to Kerry over the "intern problem," and Kerry won the nomination, it was then reported that Bill was pushing Kerry to take General Clark or Hillary as his running mate.
Although one of my sources said that Hillary complained that the Kerry campaign didn't ask for her help, both Clintons did work a bit for Kerry. The finance guru mentioned above says that had the former president not had emergency bypass on Labor Day, 2004, he would have put Kerry over the top, as evidenced by a huge Kerry rally in late October in Philadelphia; 80,000 people who came out to hear Clinton, six weeks after bypass and shortly before the election. (The crowd was not as big as the one Obama attracted before the Pennsylvania primary, but it was impressive and Kerry did win Pennsylvania).
It is true that had Kerry won Ohio, he would have won the election, but most of the big heads in the party and the punditocracy believe that no matter how much Bill campaigned, Kerry would have lost anyway. He was seen as an elitist -- the story lines in these campaigns never change -- and lost the election all on his own. In 2000 Clinton made all the difference in Al Gore's loss, they say, but in 2004 no one really cared what a former president thought. As writer and professor Larry Sabato put it in an interview with me, "In 2004 it was almost irrelevant what Clinton did or thought. Kerry lost that one on his own. it had nothing to do with Clinton."
Still the outcome in 2004, although not precisely the one the Clintons may have plotted, was the one they arguably wanted all along. At the moment, it's looking like Hillary, if she ends up losing the nomination, but so damaging Obama that he can't win, will have a path to the nomination four years from now -- so long as Democrats have short memories and don't blame Billary for blowing the clearest path to the White House the Democrats have had in years.
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As an Iowan I often wondered why Tom Vilsack came to believe he had any chance of becoming president. Remember our ex-governor?
He was in the race for about ten minutes.
This is my own pure speculation, but is it possible the Clintons encouraged a favorite son to water down the results from Iowa.
It makes more sense than the man believing his record or his base could deliver the white house.
Well here's an interesting idea. What if the Clintons secretly had some of their mutual friends (like Rahm Emanuel) encourage Obama to enter the presidential race to keep Edwards from getting a toe-hold, but then to inevitably be crushed by the Clinton steamroller.
Which certainly worked up to a point, in preventing Edwards from getting what could have been a sizable lead over Hillary but-for the presence of Obama. Except that nobody predicted Obama would catch on as he did, and no one told him he was expected to step aside for Hillary when instructed to do so.
Of course if the whole idea of secretly pushing Obama into the race but expecting him to fall by the wayside by early 2008 was Bill's idea, it certainly would explain what seems to be Bill and Hillary's intense dislike of and nastiness towards Obama.
What was Edwards' excuse the first time?
Doesn't matter one iota.
Hillary will NOT be the nominee this year and she will NOT be the nominee in 2012 or any other election year.
What part of do not want is so hard for her big money backers to understand?
Deep pockets do not always = win and in Hillary's case no amount of cash is going to make her electable to the office of President of the USA.
Thats right, just look at the cash Obama spent in Pa.
Yes, and let's also look at the PA polls right after her big "wins" in OH and TX.
Clinton was favored to win PA by 15-20% . She has name recognition based on the Clinton "brand name." She's a senator from a neighboring state.
Barack Obama is relatively unknown. All too many people also buy into the Clinton "fairy tale" of her "35 years of experience" that doesn't withstand even cursory scrutiny.
In the end, Sen. Obama cut Clinton's "decisive" win to 9.3%! And she only netted 10-12 pledged delegates, leaving Sen. Obama over 150 pledged delegates ahead.
Meanwhile, it seems that Sen. Obama has been picking up a superdelegate a day since the PA primary. If he wasn't "electable" as the Clinton spin machne would have it, do you think superdelegates, especially those elected officials from red states, would stand with Sen. Obama?
And let's not forget that Hil wants to be Chief Executive, yet she can't even manage her own campaign. She's burned through some $170 million or more and started April $1.3 million IN THE RED, and that doesn't include the $5 million she "loaned" her campaign.
And didn't reports a few days ago indicate that her big donors are tapped out?
Isn't it nice to have such patriotic people in the DemocRAT party? Only thinking of the country, never of themselves.
hopeless277,
The INSANE rhetoric Rush Limbaugh has been saying and doing can't be what the Republicans call patriotic. What kind of nut would interfere with the voting process, this is CRAZY! Rush also was calling for a RIOT at the convention! This is not patriotic!
Why would anyone logically assume that Hillary would so damage Obama that he couldn't win the general election. He does a pretty good "damage" job without any help from her, oh yes, I forgot, blame the Clintons and pass the absolution. And besides, after Bush, if Bozo theClown were the dem nominee, he'd win by a land, sea, and mudslide. This is all cable network crap to keep the ratings up and piss off the electorate. Bloggers must be running out of Hillaryisms.
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Boy! You've really nailed it. The Clintons have organized the past and are busy now with the future. Couldn't agree more. The only rational response is to gaze in wonderment at their brilliance. But if you'd rather dissect all their methods and motivations, well, who can argue with that? The Clintons will still be studied in five hundred years. Obama's name, on the other hand, will not even appear on the most powerful search engine.
a Google3000 search will yield this link:
BARACK OBAMA
Obama, 44th president (1961-2056). Led country back to moral highground, resurrected economy and helped lead the first economic expansion of the 21st Century. Easily won re-election in 2012 against Hillary Clinton, who, in late 2008, changed her party affiliation to Republican to no one's real surprise.
I LIKE your wit!!!
UH, YOU THINK??
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