Now Hillary Clinton has another challenger from the left, Lincoln Chaffee, a guy whose campaign’s raisons seem to be a) we need to switch to the metric system; and b) Hillary Clinton voted to invade Iraq.
Of course, as a red-blooded son of the Anglosphere, I utterly reject his first point, and as for the second, I appreciate his reminding me of one of the things that I like about HIllary Clinton. (Actually, it’s more like something I don’t dislike about her. She doesn’t get all that much cred from me for voting as she did, because most people did. But if she had gone against everything that was in front of her and voted the other way on Iraq, it would be a count against her.)
So there’s him and Bernie Sanders, who answers to “socialist.”
What a gift. What a pair of gifts.
This is a tremendous opportunity for Hillary Clinton — to stick to her more centrist positions, using her challengers as Exhibits A and B showing what she’s not. Thereby giving swing voters, who decide elections, reasons to like her for November 2016. Sure, the Republican nominee (if they ever settle on one) will be trying to paint her as a leftie, but voters will have the recent experience of seeing her next to the real thing. (Want a laugh? Check out Bill Moyers’ piece saying Bernie Sanders is NOT left-wing. Well, Bill, he ain’t a moderate, and he ain’t right-wing, so…)
But I suspect that she will not embrace the opportunity as enthusiastically as she should. She’ll listen to her advisers, who are Democrats rather than swing voters, who will counsel her to throw sops to the left.
Or maybe they’ll be smart. I kind of doubt it, but we’ll see.
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Now you’re going to say, “Why mention only these guys? What about Martin O’Malley, Jim Webb, and Joe Biden?”
Well, when they start getting the ink (or the pixels, or whatever) that these guys are getting, we’ll talk…
Commenting as someone with a sci-tech background, Chafee is dead right when he urges the switch to the metric system. We should have done it 50 yrs ago just to be competitive. Fixing the problem today would help give the United States a leg up in several areas where we currently suffer frequent communication errors in weights and measures.
He said Sunday he supported the switch for business and and “internationalist” reasons. His internationalist reasoning for going metric is bizarre to me to and I pretty well reject it. It’s based at least partly on his assertion that we need to do it to restore credibility after invading Iraq…what? We invaded Iraq but will do penance by changing interstate speed limits to km/hr? However, the costs to Americans trying to export, import and regulate products sold in our goofy archaic units are real, so however he got there I agree with him on at least this one point. It’s sort of agreement by the stopped clock principle, where twice a day everything lines up nicely….but it’s agreement nonetheless.
Converting to the metric system is the first step on the slippery slope that leads to us eventually calling soccer “football”.
I guess you hadn’t seen this article, then.
You know how the military is often accused of preparing for the next war by thinking it’s going to look just like the last war?
I think Hillary is doing that.
By the way, base turnout elections are difficult to pull off when the base does not like you. (See Romney, Mitt).
The base will turn out for Hillary. Its relationship with her is nothing like the GOP’s with Romney.
You’re right. It’s not that bad. But it ain’t all sunshine and puppy-dogs, either.
Well, at the very least, she’s trying to avoid the MISTAKES of the last war.
But the thing is, she doesn’t have an Obama on her left flank. She needs to avoid out-and-out offending her base, while positioning herself for the general.
Most of all, she needs to drop Plan 17 immediately once there are indications the Republicans are implementing the Schlieffen Plan…
And yeah, I’m finally back to reading The Guns of August. I stopped when I went to Thailand, and just got back to it.
But man, it’s PAINFUL. I mean, Joffre is SUCH an idiot, at this point in the war, anyway.
I read another report from the front telling him that there are WAY more Germans out there than he thinks, and he either ignores it, or says it’s GOOD they’re on the French left side because that means fewer in the Ardennes and Lorraine, and I just get so frustrated I have to get up and walk around and MARVEL at such hard-headedness.
At this point, the Battle of the Frontiers is raging, and the French are still refusing to dig in and conducting saber charges with their stupid red pants…
Guys like Bernie Sanders are only far left relative to the extremists on the far, far right. What Sanders proposes is sensible and a few decades ago, pretty moderate stuff. He proposes higher taxes on the rich. Everyone on the right wants growth. Well guess what folks, in the 60s tax rates on the rich were much, much higher than today and growth was double what it was in the Reagan years. Also, the lefties recognize the utter failure of never ending military adventures overseas. It’s obvious we are failing to achieve anything of value in the middle east by continued killing so why is so radical to push for a reduction in war making? I find it refreshing to have someone push for some sensible liberal policies. And if it nudges Hillary to the left, great!
I’m sure HR Clinton will be grateful for the campaign advice, especially from someone who dislikes most everything about her except like voting to authorize a war that was ill-advised, based on shaky premises and promoted by people who stood to profit from it (see Halliburton-Cheney connection).
The knee-jerk labeling of Bernie Sanders by a journalist who paints himself to be an issues-driven, no-labels (or at least no-party) purveyor of centrist ideas seems incongruous or perhaps revealing. I’ve never found Brad to be intellectually lazy enough to go short on learning public figures’ actual positions in favor of sweeping generalizations or caricatures, but maybe things are just too complicated or nuanced to inspire discretion.