Clinton/Vilsack 2008?

Recommend...del.icio.us Digg it Furl Netvouz Netscape Newsvine reddit Yahoo MyWeb July 17th, 2006 at 08:19pm Geraldine

The rumors are going around, and Vilsack is set to appear with Hillary in DC this week at a Democratic Governors Association press conference. Here’s how the Register reports it:

Some pundits as well as Democratic activists have suggested Vilsack would be a good fit on a ticket with Clinton as presidential nominee. Both are active in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, and both have insisted they will not demand a specific date for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq.

A few days back, Hotline proposed some theories about the role Hillary could play in the race for the ‘08 Democratic nomination. Theory 1:

…unless she either doesn’t run or appears very vulnerable early on , one theory of the case holds that they will spend their time cozying up to her and tearing into each other. (Grover Norquist endorses that theory, too.) At least in part, they’ll try to use the primaries to audition for the general election.

To be clear: Bayh, Warner, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack — they all want to be president, not vice president. But they will almost certainly hedge their bets. They will not run a true-blue, rouse-the-base primary campaign.

Theory 2, however, simply says that Hillary is too polarizing a figure and won’t get anywhere. In that case, though, candidates might still stick to centrist rhetoric in an effort to distinguish themselves from Clinton (if the voters aren’t convinced by Hillary’s current centrist bent).

Frank Luntz’s piece today doesn’t talk much about this, but Luntz does attempt to lay out a strategy for Hillary to get elected. I’m really not sure a short, public essay could possibly prove useful to a presidential campaign, but here’s his first recommendation:

First, she must be herself. Her recent tack to the right - from equivocating on the Iraq war, to supporting a ban on flag burning - is fooling no one and is seriously agitating her liberal base. The reason Hillary became so popular in the first place was her unflinching willingness to tell it like it is. She must say what she means, and mean what she says.

Similarly, recent efforts by Clinton to inject religious references into her speeches to prove she’s a person of faith is like fingernails on a chalkboard to Democrat primary voters. Clinton must win the primary first - then worry about the general election. If Democrats really cared about religion, they’d be Republicans.

Will she? And is she really the vicious liberal that Luntz thinks she is in the first place? Perhaps, but it’s not looking like it right now.

I should also note that our coverage of 2008 contenders has been spotty of late. Our schedules haven’t permitted us to attend the candidates’ appearances across the state (which isn’t to say we don’t like getting the invitations, so thanks to the staffers who have kept us on their mailing lists…), so we’ve been reading Chris’s coverage on PoliticalForecast. We hope to get better as our schedules permit, but we still plan to spend more time analyzing the political issues facing Iowa than we’ll spend on national political celebrity watch.

And check out MyDD’s presidential straw poll, now reinstated.  Chris Bowers rightly discontinued it four months ago because of how repetitive the results were, but maybe things will be different now.

Related Posts

• Who Will Fill The Vilsack Vacuum In Iowa?
• Barack Obama Won!
• Why Does Tom Latham Want Italy’s Radioactive Waste?
• Support Ed Fallon’s Summer Vacation!
• Democratic Prospects Looking Even Better In State Senate

Entry Filed under: Miscellaneous, President 2008

Related Searches: democratic governors association, grover norquist, democratic leadership council, frank luntz, tom vilsack