Peggy Noonan: Is Hillary Going To Fall? Would Reagan Survive Today’s GOP?
Great read from Ms. Noonan. I had caught the Clinton mentioning Obama’s drug use thing this week. You know, the old opponent’s trick, “So I hear you’re a wife beater and a child molester.” Even though it is an outright fabrication, it presents the mind picture to the public and leaves it out there and tarnishes you. And just when you thought it was going away, your opponent does “The right thing” and apologizes to you for calling you a wife beater and a child molester. Thus rehashing the picture and leaving a subconsciously negative taste in people’s mouths.
Your opponent has just royally fucked you by playing the old dirty trick.
Hillary did it to Obama with the drug thing this week. And Huckabee did it to Romney with the “Don’t Mormons believe that Jesus and the Devil are brothers?” Question, letting the negativity swirl around, and then swoop in after the debate with all the press watching and apologize…thus rehashing the negativity on your opponent while you come out the real nice guy for apologizing for an ill–informed remark you can blame on someone who most definitely won’t be around next week.
I find it really hard to believe that Huckabee would purposely do something like that, but hindsight being what it is, and politics being what they are…well…
This from the Wall Street Journal:
The Pulpit and the Potemkin Village
Would Reagan survive in today’s GOP? And is Mrs. Clinton in for a fall this winter?
By Peggy Noonan
This thought occurs that Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign is, and always was, a Potemkin village, a giant head fake, a haughty facade hollow at the core. That she is disorganized on the ground in Iowa, taken aback by a challenge to her invincibility, that she doesn’t actually have an A team, that her advisers have always been chosen more for proven loyalty than talent, that her supporters don’t feel deep affection for her. That she’s scrambling chaotically to catch up, with surrogates saying scuzzy things about Barack Obama and drug use, and her following up with apologies that will, as always, keep the story alive. That her guru-pollster, the almost universally disliked Mark Penn, has, according to Newsday, become the focus of charges that he has “mistakenly run Clinton as a de facto incumbent” and that the top officials on the campaign have never had a real understanding of Iowa.
This is true of Mrs. Clinton and her Iowa campaign: They thought it was a queenly procession, not a brawl. Now they’re reduced to spinning the idea that expectations are on Mr. Obama, that he’d better win big or it’s a loss. They’ve been reduced too to worrying about the weather. If there’s a blizzard on caucus day, her supporters, who skew old, may not turn out. The defining picture of the caucuses may be a 78-year-old woman being dragged from her home by young volunteers in a tinted-window SUV.
This is, still, an amazing thing to see. It is a delight of democracy that now and then assumptions are confounded, that all the conventional wisdom of the past year is compressed and about to blow. It takes a Potemkin village.
Read the whole thing here.
Be respectful of others and their opinions. Inflammatory remarks and inane leftist drivel will be deleted. It ain’t about free speech, remember you’re in a private domain. My website, my prerogative.
If you can't handle using your real email address, don't bother posting a comment.
Huckabee has said enough naive and imprudent things that it could very well be yet another imprudent remark. Either way, it doesn’t exactly raise a person’s estimation of him as a candidate.
December 14th, 2007 at 3:39 pmReagan would own the Republican party.
He could face all of the Democrat presidential candidates against him alone in one debate and hand them their asses.
I think Newt could have done the same thing.
December 14th, 2007 at 10:26 pmOh please….Reagan would have “owned” every Dhimicrat running in the 2008 election.
The Hildabeast’s greatest asset to the Republicans is the big foot that she keeps in her mouth all the time. That and her husband Billy Bob.
All Obama has to do is nail her on every one of her missteps. Get out his attack machine and smash the Klinton leg-breakers and their BS rhetoric and he’ll do fine.
The Republicans need to settle on one candidate and move on.
December 15th, 2007 at 9:32 amWhich one? Mitt, Guliani, Thompson or Huckanee? We’ll see after the SC primary.
The republicans have become Soclialists and the Democrats have become Communists. Regean would be very confused about that. Probably clean house or move to Russia where he knows what he is getting.
December 15th, 2007 at 12:05 pm