The Chickens Come Home to Roost for Hillary (and James Carville)

Who is James Carville damaging most with his blundering fundraising pitch - his candidate, his party, or his network? His line - "Hillary won't back down, and we've got her back" - is the perfect holographic image of everything that is wrong with her candidacy. It wraps self-centeredness, poor judgment, and political tone-deafness into nine compact words.

It's Louis XIV politics - "le parti, c'est moi" - combined with Marie Antoinette selfishness. And it's certainly helpful to be reminded that Hillary's the type of politician who "won't back down" when they make a bad decision. Just what we need: Another politician who's too stubborn to admit they were wrong. As if eight years of the last one wasn't enough.

Well done, James. Now go home.

Hillary's back? We're supposed to worry about covering Hillary's back? What part of the phrase "public service" don't Hillary and James understand? Leaders are supposed to cover our backs, not the other way around. In Hillary's case, she should have been watching the backs of our troops in Iraq for the past four years, instead of being so concerned about her own.

I wrote about Sen. Clinton last year, "If you're not there when we need you, we won't be there when you need us." Hillary, James: The chickens have come home to roost.

Not only is Carville working for one candidate while commenting on others in his role as a CNN pundit, but he's quickly demonstrating why he is the most over-rated political operative of the last forty years. Remember, he took the most gifted politician of a generation - Bill Clinton - and, through his patented brand of self-promotion and DLC cynicism, lost Congress and never won an popular majority for President.

The old gambit of "we had bad intelligence" doesn't wash. The UN inspectors were begging for time to complete their mission. There was enough information out there for 23 Senators to vote against the resolution. Voting for it was a mistake. But Hillary, under Carville's inept guidance, would rather show the world how tough she can be - and how selfish.

Well, we already knew that. We wanted to see the ability to learn, grow, admit mistakes. It's too late now. Thanks, James, for helping to illustrate that so effectively for the rest of us. Now Hillary should quit the campaign and go back to something she actually does quite well - being a United States Senator. James Carville can retire from politics and enjoy the easy money of vacuous punditry.

And the rest of us can get to work finding a candidate that can win, and can be counted on to do the right thing once they do.

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