Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Can't win on hate alone

Two conflicting titles today

It Takes an Agenda

Conservatives cannot live by Hillary-hate alone.

and

Candidate Hillary: the GOP's dream

While there's no question that rabid conservatives like me are dying for a crack at the Hildebeast, the GOP is going to have to come up with a message that's more than "at least we're not her. Money quote from the first article....

“Of the top three Democratic candidates, she’s absolutely the weakest in the general election,” Rasmussen says. “Hillary is a unifying factor for Republicans, and Republicans aren’t otherwise unified. If Hillary is the nominee, this is a competitive race.”

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.


For Goldberg's analysis click here

For Weigel's click here

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