Dick Morris, Re: "The Truth About Hillary Clinton"
"The fact is that these personal attacks just empower the woman and give her examples of over-the-top criticism that she can use to demean the arguments of all who doubt her, for good reasons or for bad... In doing so, she can discredit any critics, no matter how reasonable his or her disagreement, with the same brush and label them fanatics who level absurd and irrelevant charges against her."
Ya know, I have this theory about Dick Morris' political skills. 10% of the time, he's so dead-on accurate that he's scary good and 90% of the time, he's just pure crap. This quote, I think, falls in the 10% part.
Worth mentioning, but I also believe there's two camps of Democrats that are either opposed to Hillary outright or aren't rushing to her side as her name keeps being floated for the White House in 2008:
- those that hate all things Clinton and think 4-8 years of Hillary would be the death of the far left.
- those that think she's too much of a lightning rod to get elected.
The first group isn't likely to back HRC when she makes the 08 campaign ... look for a revised form of the Jerry Brown '92 campaign or Dennis Kucinich '04 campaign to serve as a paperweight on the opposite scale of Democratic Party politics. The second group, however, is more persuadable. As a parcel of the persuasion to that group that they would be wise to get over the defeatism that basically suggests Hillary is already "defeated," is that I think it's worth pointing out that whomever our nominee would be, the other side will do their worst at a crass hatchet job. There'll be another Whitewater, another lying sack of unpatriotic crap like John O'Neill, another character assassination, another whatever. It's not like there's a point so low that the other side won't stoop to.
Hillary's got two advantages that no other candidate can possibly possess like she does: she's been tested, and she's succeeded in the face of those tests. Upstate New Yorkers weren't supposed to be the least bit fond of Hill. She won em over well enough to win in 2000 and is currently polling well enough to think that she'll top even those results in '06. For many New Yorkers, the caricature of Hillary hasn't held up to the reality. She uses that disparity wisely and to her benefit. The latest book/smear campaign is but one more effort to build up the caricature. It's also one more opportunity for Hillary to highlight the crassness of the other side's attacks, posing as the better alternative.
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