Hillary's Closing Strategy: Be Afraid

[TeamJordan23]

Hillary's Final Strategy: Be Afraid

Eldridge, Iowa - Barack Obama and John Edwards might want to change the world. But Hillary Clinton wants to protect you against it.

That's the unmistakable message that Senator Clinton is pounding out in this final phase of the campaign to capture the Iowa caucuses. In a world brimming with danger and uncertainty, she argues as she blitzes the Hawkeye State, there's no time to waste daydreaming about pie-in-the-sky promises of reform.

Instead, the American people must choose a leader ready to immediately start fixing the problems that already exist and one who is immediately ready to face the inevitable and "unpredictable" crises looming right over the horizon. And that would be Clinton.

"We know some of the challenges that await the next president," Clinton told a packed crowd at a junior high school Saturday morning. "But no matter how much we know, we can't possibly anticipate all the problems."

The razzamatazz cheerleading, sloganeering style that punctuated her earlier campaign events has now been replaced by a sedate, somber, even grave tone coming from the podium. Clinton never raised her voice, never elevated the mood, and at times sounded like a concerned, responsible parent telling the kids that something terrible was taking place outside the door but not to worry because Mom and Dad - or in this case Hill and Bill- would take care of it.

Becoming president, she said in a hushed tone, is "an awesome responsibility. And it was thrown into relief with the events last Thursday with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2007/12/29/hillarys-final-strategy_n_78720.html

Bill Clinton Warns of "Unexpected"

NASHUA, N.H. -- Bill Clinton has added a new reason why his wife should be the Democratic nominee for president, what he called "most important of all": she would be best able to "deal with the unexpected," he said here today, with an allusion to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Addressing more than 100 supporters gathered at a VFW hall here, Clinton said that there were four reasons to vote for his wife: her vision, her plans, her experience -- the three reasons he has been giving in his stump speech until now -- plus, he said, a fourth, the threat of the unknown.

"Here's the other thing you need to know, the most important thing of all. You have to have a leader who is strong and commanding and convincing enough...to deal with the unexpected," he said. "There is a better than a 50 percent chance that sometime in the first year or 18 months of the next presidency something will happen that is not being discussed in this campaign. President Bush never talked about Osama Bin Laden and didn't foresee Hurricane Katrina. And if you're not ready for that then everything else you do can be undermined. You need a president that you trust to deal with something that we will not discuss in this campaign....And I think on this score she's the best of all."

Clinton has been edging closer in recent weeks to arguing that the country would be taking a chance if voters nominated someone with less experience in Washington, such as Barack Obama. Speaking in Plymouth, N.H. last week, he said that his wife would be best suited to handle the challenges of terrorism, climate change and income inequality, and hinted that if these challenges were not met, that the world, or at least American democracy, might be in peril in the coming decades.

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2007/12/29/bill_clinton_warns_of_unexpect.html#more?hpid=topnews