Why silly speculation about the 2016 presidential race can do some real good

[DonViejo]

Let the Race Begin!

Why silly speculation about the 2016 presidential race can do some real good.

By John Dickerson|Posted Tuesday, April 2, 2013, at 8:53 PM

Hillary Clinton takes the stage tonight for the first time since leaving the State Department. The talk about her running for president in 2016 has swelled ever since. The combination of Clinton's stature, the stretch of time between now and the first caucus, and the media's undifferentiated love for presidential campaigns is going to create a vast bloom of speculation. We should call in the meteorologists, because by 2014 you're going to be able to spot it on Doppler radar.

This is mostly terrible. There's nothing wrong with the idea of a Clinton candidacy, but the coverage of that idea is going to encourage us to be stupid at times. (She’ll eat corn and people will say she’s pandering to Iowa.) Clinton is very popular, and people want to know if she's going to run. Fair enough. But she's probably not going to let us know for quite some time. In a reasonable world, we'd task someone to wake us when Clinton is ready to tell us she’s running. (In this world we’d do the same thing with vice presidential picks. No more veepstakes!)

But we don't live in that world. For some time, no one will really know what Clinton is going to do, but that will not stop us from guessing. In the absence of information, the stories will come—and they will keep coming. They probably won’t be nourishing either. If only we could produce some kind of energy—something useful or productive—with all of this feverish activity.

This is a shame, because there are some good things about starting the 2016 presidential race early. While taking a poll that pits Hillary Clinton against Marco Rubio right now is silly, the fact that Rubio may be thinking about running is not. Presidential races excite ambition, which causes politicians to take risks, which can start conversations about important ideas. Our day-to-day political life is small, but in the presidential conversation it's still possible to imagine bigger things. It is a place to discuss first principles. (This is distinct from the nature of the conversation during a presidential campaign, which gets very small fast.)

-snip-

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2013/04/hillary_clinton_s_white_house_ambitions_speculation_about_the_2016_presidential.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content

[elleng]

1. Darn, I thought end of headline sentence was

'can drive you crazy!'

[antigop]

2. talking about 2016 now is just trying to spread the "inevitability" meme again. nt

[Sunlei]

3. we can whipsaw republicans into spending billions on their campaigns because none of them work free

free republican funds stimulus are great for the local economies