The challenge of being Hillary: E.J. Dionne

[BeyondGeography]

WASHINGTON -- It has never been easy to be Hillary Clinton.

Evidence for that proposition is already in the minds of many who are reading this: What do you mean Hillary hasn't had it easy? Would she even be in this race if she hadn't been married to Bill Clinton? Would she have been elected to the Senate from New York? Would she have received all those speaking fees?

See what I mean?

...If you gather from this that I have a more favorable view of her than the current conventional wisdom prescribes, you'd be right. As a friend said recently, there is the Methodist-youth-group side of Hillary Clinton that people don't pay much attention to, the moralist who was moved by Christian social justice concerns away from the conservatism of her family. (I may empathize with her conversion because a similar thing happened to me as a Catholic.) Her earliest work was on behalf of poor kids and migrant workers.

...in Sanders, she has an opponent whom every progressive (myself included) instinctively likes. Sanders' willingness to declare himself a democratic socialist helps him more than it hurts him among Democrats: His boldness plays well against Clinton's reputation for political calculation. Hearing Sanders, you just know that he means exactly what he says.

...My hunch is that Clinton's stock is being undersold. After Iowa and New Hampshire, the contest moves to ground far more favorable to her. Her standing in most national polls of Democrats remains strong, and large numbers of Sanders' sympathizers also have a positive view of her.

But Sanders' new ad built around Simon & Garfunkel's song "America" is a warning to Clinton: It brilliantly captures how his campaign, like Obama's, feels like a movement. It is a cathartic expression of Democratic frustration with prudent pragmatism in the face of Republican intransigence.

The quietly rational Methodist who observed in 2008 that the "celestial choirs" rarely sing in politics and that she is under "no illusions about how hard this will be" was quite right about governing these days. But someone for whom nothing will ever be easy still needs to find her own brand of inspiration.

http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/01/the_challenge_of_being_hillary.html

[Doctor_J]

1. I certainly believe that with her voting record, recent history of taking money to tell billionaires

what they want to hear, and support for issues like dadt, doma, TPP, and the pipeline, she would have a difficult time winning the nomination if not for her gender and name recognition. She is tough though.

[BeyondGeography]

2. She is

Scared pretty much the whole party into not running against her. Having rooted hard against her in 2008, I have a pedestrian's appreciation of the challenges she poses. For instance, I was surprised how easily she defeated Obama in NY and California and many other big states like TX, PA and OH. She had a huge amount of voters in place, and does so again, IMO. If not for Mark Penn's ineptitude re. caucus states, it would have been a different outcome. I don't see her losing the nomination this time, but I do worry about Nov. Dionne makes a great point about poetry, or the lack thereof.

[KoKo]

3. A fair article by E. J. Dionne

Quote from the Article:

The quietly rational Methodist who observed in 2008 that the "celestial choirs" rarely sing in politics and that she is under "no illusions about how hard this will be" was quite right about governing these days. But someone for whom nothing will ever be easy still needs to find her own brand of inspiration.