digby: The Presidential

[babylonsister]

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/presidential-by-digby-very-savvy-friend.html


The Presidential

by digby

A very savvy friend of mine, a political player of many years, has put together a memo for various interested parties about the lay of the political landscape which he has allowed me to share with you. I'll excerpt passages in various posts over the next week or so, but I thought you might be interested today on his thoughts on the presidential race:


The Presidential


snip//

What we know, so far, is that Hillary Clinton runs a very efficient and nearly error free campaign. There is no question of her sizable lead in early national polls. John Edwards is running an unabashedly liberal campaign about the economic divide in this country. He will take chances. Barack Obama has built an amazing network of financial and presumably grassroots supporters and continues to demonstrate tremendous potential. It is hard to see much of an opening for Senators Dodd or Biden, and Bill Richardson needs to win the Nevada caucus to move into serious contention.

The Republicans are in some trouble in part because there is no heir apparent to anoint with the nomination. Their current putative frontrunner, Rudy Giuliani, is somewhat radioactive to the right to lifers, gun lobby and nativists at the base of the party. Certainly, he does echo the neocons well. He also has a trainload of personal baggage. Fred Thompson parachutes into the race from his perch on TV, but he also raises a series of questions. Most of his career has been as a lobbyist. Either he or Mike Huckabee will become the Southern conservative in the race. History has shown this is not a bad place to be in the GOP. Ron Paul, the Libertarian Congressman, is going to do better than expected.

snip//

So there remain many serious obstacles in the path of any Democratic nominee, despite the current good news.

That money angle is especially important and something I don't think many of us in the Netroots are quite prepared for. The Democrats will be forced to rely on free media for nearly six months if the primary is decided as early as everyone thinks it will be. We need to think about how to deal with that.

And then there is the specter of corporations spending unlimited dollars on "persuasion" ads. This could be very powerful stuff, using the full energy of corporate marketing and advertising to sell the Republicans to a country that doesn't want them. It works all the time in the marketplace. We'll see if they can pull it off in politics.

As my friend notes, the Republicans are very good at campaigning and character assassination. It's what they do best, and the Democrats just simply don't have an equal talent. When you combine it with the GOP's nearly limitless access to money, it's a serious mistake to assume that the Dems can't lose. In a world where vast amounts of Republican money and corporate liars weren't available to bombard the people with an alternate reality, perhaps we could relax and assume that their epically disastrous performance in office would automatically disqualify them from winning any further elections for a while. But we don't live in that world. It's would be a very good idea to be prepared for some very, very nasty trench warfare.