HILLARY CLINTON V. HOWARD DEAN - New Republic article
Thu Jul 27, 2006 at 10:13:38 AM PDT
I shouldn't even diary an article from the New Republic but this one has me seeing red.
Hillary and Bill instead of uniting the party are trying to split it. They are not on the same page as Dean, the DNC or the netroots. They are playing the old trianglization game. This time with their own party. They just don't understand the the GOP came to power by respecting and using all of their constituency & organizations. Hillary is hoping to marginalize Dean (DNC) and split the blogesphere to come to power.
The Grudge
She doesn't want no stinking DNC messing up her chance to be president.
Now Clinton's camp is seeking to change this landscape. Its strategy appears to be twofold. First, it is laying the groundwork to circumvent the DNC in the event that Clinton wins the nomination. Her advisers see Dean as a maverick, and they want to depend on him as little as possible during the general election. "The DNC is going to be peripheral," says one Clinton strategist. "We are going to have our own field staff, starting way before the primaries begin, right through November 7." He points out that she is prepared to reject public financing during the primaries and the general election. (Clinton does not lack for money: She has raised $32.2 million for her Senate reelection and has $22 million in the bank--all transferable to her presidential campaign, according to PoliticalMoneyLine.) This would allow her to keep the field staff she develops during the primaries on her payroll during the general election--instead of shifting it to the DNC, as previous candidates have done. Plus, in a move widely and correctly interpreted as a rebuke to Dean, Clinton strategist Harold Ickes recently established a private voter database to compete with a similar database being built by the DNC. Ickes's move--as well as Clinton's formidable array of experienced advisers, including Terry McAuliffe, Howard Wolfson, James Carville, Mark Penn, and others--will give Clinton added independence from the DNC.
Second, Clinton and her operatives have begun working systematically to fracture her online opposition. Perhaps the most noteworthy step in this strategy was her July 4 announcement that she would endorse the winner of the Connecticut primary, ditching Joe Lieberman if he fails to capture the Democratic nomination. Clinton's announcement seemed calculated to win plaudits on the Web--and it did. "Good for Clinton," wrote Duncan Black of the blog Eschaton. "She should get a lot of credit for coming out and making this announcement," wrote blogger David Sirota.
Being the New Republic we already knew who was going to come out on top
who will win the showdown between Howard and Hillary? In both the long term and the short term, the odds favor Clinton and her allies in the party's more moderate wing. Take the long term first. Many of the troops brought into politics by the Dean campaign are desperate to turn their avocation into a paying profession. Many left-wing bloggers are struggling to survive financially and would love to begin earning salaries as political operatives. For instance, Bowers and two friends, Hale Stewart (aka "bonddad") and David Atkins (aka "thereisnospoon"), recently announced the creation of NetRoots Research, Strategy & Analysis. As bloggers like these enter the competition for consulting contracts and campaign jobs, the pressures of the political marketplace will likely work to moderate idealism--and to make compromise and accommodation more acceptable within the netroots.
In the short term, Clinton's strategy of dividing and conquering the blogosphere will be abetted by the nearimpossibility of Web-based Dean loyalists uniting around a single candidate in 2007. Zack Exley--formerly organizing director for MoveOn.org, an Internet specialist on the Dean campaign, and director of online organizing and communications for Kerry-Edwards 2004--puts it this way: "I think Hillary is going to surprise everyone with the netroots. Every candidate who is flirting with the idea of running is trying to do it like Dean did it. You could have ten candidates trying to be the insurgent dark horse. All those candidates are going to split the netroots, leaving Hillary to be the standout." The netroots have simply become too large to be the exclusive agent of any one candidate. With her front-runner status, Clinton doesn't need to actually win the blogosphere outright; she just needs to make sure no one else does. And odds are there will be no repeat of 2003, when the liberal blogosphere rallied overwhelmingly to one contender.
That, in the end, may be Clinton's biggest advantage in her battle with Dean. Of course, there is always the possibility that Clinton will falter. But, if she does not, then Dean, with his supporters unable to coalesce behind a single candidate, will likely find himself without a proxy to run against her. Then again, he may not even want one. After all, there is probably only one candidate Dean could ever truly back, and he is sitting out this race. His name, of course, is Howard Dean.
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New Rebublic - The Grudge
Tags: Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, DNC, DLC, netroots, establishment (all tags) :: Previous Tag Versions
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