I agree with Yuval Rubinstein of The Left Coaster. Having Hillary Clinton be our presidential candidate for 2008 is a very bad move for a party that needs to re-invent itself. Hillary is doing fine in NY where she can be an effective Senate leader, but beyond that safe zone is a war zone of folks who just do not like her.
Yuval offers his reasons, one of which I believe is crucial:
However, the incredible revulsion (whether it's fair or not) that Hillary inspires cannot be dismissed. As a result, I think there will be a "Stop Hillary" movement within the party that will be even more ferocious than the anti-Dean movement. It goes without saying that this is not what we need in the 2008 primaries.
Amen. But there are other things why Hillary may be a very poor choice.
Now,
I'm not making this up. Some (maybe more than I know) voted for Bush because they said it was predetermined in the scriptures that this was going to happen. And, I have personally heard this from a good friend of mine, they said that in 2008 the antichrist will rise up and assume control, and while one person said that it was a muslim, the others said that the antichrist was Hillary Clinton.
You may laugh, but I think everyone should take this seriously, because these are the folks that are deciding elections for us. So, by putting Hillary into running for President, we stand to have two possibilities: either they will overwhelmingly vote Hillary in to fulfill the scripture (not likely), or they will massively turn out in fear of electing an "antichrist" to the White House. I don't know which side they will take, but I would guess it will likely be the latter. The last thing we want is to rapidly regenerate fear with these people to vote against a candidate that will be for their interests. Of course the aura of having the first woman president will generate some excitement with some folks, but the plan is to get Republicans out of power not to keep them in there, and I fear we'll do the latter should Hillary run.
If anything, we need to start the campaign now to ask Hillary not to run for President, but rather stay in the Senate and aim to be majority leader one day. We need to have a candidate who the people initially want to vote for, not one they already want to vote against.