Conservatives cannot live by Hillary-hate alone.

[question everything]

October 22, 2007 Issue

It Takes an Agenda

Conservatives cannot live by Hillary-hate alone.
The American Conservative
by David Weigel

(snip)


But see if you can spot the problem. Conservatives are fraught, angry at their traditional party, unable to decide on a standard-bearer, unsure even what they stand for. They don’t think this is the year to sort those problems out. They’re counting on a short-cut when the Democrats nominate an unelectable cold fish who has infuriated the Right for a decade and a half. Millions remember how they felt when she belittled other wives for “staying home and baking cookies,” and Bill Clinton promised voters “two for the price of one” if they sent his family to the White House. On the Right, the list of grievances was even longer. Both Clintons were seen as ambassadors of 1960s radicalism and cultural decadence, and Hillary was the worse of the two: a pro-choice feminist who didn’t take her husband’s name until pollsters told her it would help him make a political comeback.

Yet for all of that outrage, Republicans lost that election to the Clintons. And the hope that voters will see what they see and reject what the Clintons stand for resembles the plan Democrats clung to in 2004. They choose John Kerry on the theory he would be the least controversial general-election candidate, then counted on an electorate fed up with George W. Bush to deliver the election. In the nearly three years since, Hillary has been the de facto Democratic candidate. The Right’s efforts to attack her have fallen completely, pathetically flat. Her popularity is low, but not much lower than Bush’s was in 2004. If the linchpin of a 2008 campaign is unifying Republicans in the cause of defeating Hillary, it might be enough to stitch together most of the conservative movement—but not enough to win.


(snip)

And those efforts have been absolute triumphs compared to the third-party anti-Hillary efforts and PACs. The first sign that conservative donors were growing less animated about the Clintons was the launch of Stop Her Now in February 2005. Republican strategist Arthur Finkelstein planned on raising $10 million for a campaign along the lines of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the 2004 group that raised $27 million to attack John Kerry’s Vietnam service and his homeland antiwar activism. Finkelstein failed. The group recorded a radio ad that was never broadcast and from its founding through June 2005, reported only one $500 donation. Over the next year, Clinton glided to her Senate re-election as the group raised only $25,000, and she out-raised her opponent by nearly ten to one.



(snip)

That might be one reason the Right can’t rally against Hillary. Conservative division has led to depression, a sense that a Clinton restoration is inevitable, and that the best plan going ahead is to wait for her election and watch as, like her husband, she stumbles and seeds a GOP comeback. A mid-July CBS News poll revealed that 53 percent of Republicans thought it was very or somewhat likely that Clinton would win the presidency. Few Republicans think the party can win back Congress in 2008. Combine that with the anger that between one-third and one-quarter of the GOP base feels toward George W. Bush, and the relentless negativity starts to make sense.

(snip)

There is another reason conservatives can’t count on Hillary: she offends and irritates them so deeply that they have trouble actually strategizing against her. They launch attacks, but compared to the carefully plotted Swift Boat strike on John Kerry or the years-long effort to spotlight Al Gore’s strange bragging and fibbing, the anti-Hillary attacks are erratic, grabbing early media attention and then fading out of the picture. Conservatives fixate on long-dormant scandals, like Bill Clinton’s treatment of Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick, without appreciating that reporters no longer want to chase those stories and that their very mention stokes sympathy for Clinton’s wife.

(snip)

http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_10_22/cover.html

[Lucinda]

1. That was an interesting read. Thank You!

[izquierdista]

2. Sure they can

The conservative mind sets up faster than a hot load of concrete. It solidifies around the reactionary hate of the day, be it racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, or in the case of the 1990s conservatives, anti-Clinton. And it NEVER changes. There will be Clinton haters around until they die away some 50 years hence. Archie Bunker was the typical FDR hater, and he was spewing his bile in the 1970s, thirty years after the death of FDR. At some point, they become laughable in their irrationality, as Archie certainly was.

The only real cure for conservative hate is death. As all the old segregationists die off, their race-baiting tactics seem more and more bizarre. We are seeing the same thing happen in the acceptance of gays as a part of society. The most vocal opposition is from those who embraced their political views before the sexual revolution of the 1960s, people now over 60. The generation in school now thinks of gay as no big thing and when they are adults, civilization will take another step forward by getting rid of another irrational prejudice.

I think the article is perceptive though in realizing that conservatism leads to depression. It did so in the 1920s, and it's doing so again as people realize that government by people who say "government doesn't work" is just plain stupid.

[question everything]

4. What is interesting is that in 1964

Goldwater was the symbol of the nutty conservative yet, by the time he died, he grew into a moderate, old conservative who believed that a small government meant it had no place inside people's bedrooms or doctors' offices.

And, this should take the reason for not voting for Clinton.

[Vickers]

5. I love your Archie Bunker analogy.

:thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup::thumbsup:

[Perry Logan]

3. They "can't rally against Hillary"? The poor, tortured devils.