This is the blog post I submitted today, per Hillary's advertisement below.
DESPITE LITTLE SUPPORT AMONG NETROOTS, CLINTON ADVERTISES "GUEST BLOGGER" SPOT ON DKOS.
In 2002, at the height of George Bush's popularity, Hillary Clinton pandered to conservatives with her YES vote on the AUMF resolution that helped send us to war in Iraq. Months later, she pandered to the so-called "middle" by offering her support to an anti-flag-burning initiative. Today, she's pandering to the netroots, offering DailyKos readers the chance to make the first "guest blogger" post on her campaign website.
How shocking.
Well I, for one, am not going to waste my opportunity to kick off the Clinton Blog Effort with a nice dose of netroots reality - one that will probably guarantee that this Kossack doesn't come anywhere near landing the "guest blogger" spot with the Clinton team:
HILLARY CLINTON VOTED FOR THE WAR AND, TO THIS DAY, REFUSES TO ADMIT THAT HER VOTE WAS A MISTAKE.
Which is why the netroots will never support her in the primary, in which a number of candidates whose positions on the Iraq War (and, if applicable, the Iraq War Vote) differ distinctly from those of Hillary are already seeking our support.
Barack Obama, for example. Say what you will about him, but he at least came into the Senate as an antiwar candidate. John Edwards, another example. He admitted, loudly and clearly, that his war vote was a mistake.
And if Al Gore should enter the race, we in the netroots will undoubtedly help him suck all the oxygen out of the room and send the other candidates packing. After all, he opposed the war from the beginning, he sides with us on everything the average Democrat cares about and, most importantly, he was the first major figure to stick his neck out and endorse the patron saint of all bloggers, Gov. Howard Dean, in the 2004 Presidential race. Yep, Big Al has what we call "street cred."
Hillary Clinton has no street cred. She's the ultimate insider. She's a relic of the era when grassroots Democrats just kind of accepted the candidates the DC power apparatus handed them. The fact that she's even running at all proves who she's listening to: McAullife-era insiders who've spent years making her candidacy a fait accompli and enshrining her as the perennial Democratic "frontrunner." I mean, hey, she's "in to win!!" And to this crowd, what really matters is what gets decided over dinner in Washington DC.
Unfotunately for Mrs. Clinton, those days are over. When it comes to Democratic Primaries, it is the opinion only of real Democrats - Democrats like us here in the netroots - that matters. Ask Joe Lieberman. He'll tell you that, in a primary, Democrats are voting the war nowadays. It is THE litmus test of any candidate's Democratic street cred and those who fail that test do not survive the primary. Democrats of all shapes and sizes should be grateful for this, because it is the very thing that gave us our victories in November: our ability to speak with moral authority about this war.
If Hillary is going to win the primary, she will do it in spite of us. She'll make a few early overtures - like the one I'm writing about right now. But when she finally grasps the fact that the netroots doesn't really like her and will be working instead for Edwards or Obama or trying to draft Al Gore, she'll give up on us and return to the only politics she really knows.
If her campaign fails, it will be an intriguing measure of how far the netroots has come. If she succeeds, we will know just how far we have left to go.