Chris Dodd is on the air in Iowa with a new ad.
I like it.
The emphasis on what is, rather than what was, is good. Nice declarative sentences.
Contrast that with the following from the Boston Globe
in answer to a question about what difference a woman president would make.
By Hillary Clinton
December 12, 2007
In recent interviews with the Globe editorial board, the three leading Democratic presidential candidates were each asked a question unique to his or her campaign. Here are their answers.
I THINK it will make a tremendous difference. I think it will make a big difference here at home, and I think it will make a big difference around the world. You know, when I travel around the country and go to these events . . . there are two groups of people that I am particularly moved by. One are women in their 90s. You know, when this started happening, I thought it was a bit of atypical - that there would be all of these women in their 90s at my events. And I now see them everywhere I go. And a lot of them say something along the lines of, 'I was born before women can vote and I am going to live long enough to see you in the White House.' And it is so personal and it is so intense that I have been just enormously moved by it.
And then on the other end of the age spectrum are all of these little girls whose parents bring them and, as I'm going along a rope line, and I heard a father or mother bend over and say, 'See, honey, you can be anything you want to be.' You know, that's what my parents told me, but who would have ever believed it, right? And I think that we were of the first generation of women who had anybody telling them that, and there were a lot of barriers you had to go through. You know, when I was college-aged, there were colleges I couldn't go to. There were scholarships I couldn't get. There were jobs that weren't open to me. You know, there were all of these things that we've seen change in our lifetimes, and the idea that parents are bringing their kids, particularly their daughters, and saying that - I think sort of speaks to how big this is in the minds of a lot of people. And I think around the world it would be game-changing in lots of ways. You know, when I gave that speech in '95 in Beijing, it was meant to be a kind of call to action about women's rights. And we've made some progress in the last 12 years, but we haven't made enough, and we can see how suppression of women is directly tied to extremism, to anti-democratic forces. I think that having a woman president. . . you know, I'm not running as a woman. I'm running because I think I'm the best qualified and experienced person to do the job, but having a woman president is a tremendous statement to the rest of the world that I think would be to America's advantage, and would help us more than any policy would on a lot of the forward movement that we need to have within societies when it comes to women.
From which we conclude what? That if a woman is elected President:
very old women would die happy
very young women aren't led down the garden path with false expectations
the game will be changed
what Hillary thinks defines an issue
the American example would move other societies forward (like in Iraq?/snark/)
BTW, the Democratic candidate in the Ohio 05 was not elected yesterday, despite the DCCC pouring tons of money into ads. There is a suggestion that the candidate not being clearly identified as a Democrat or against the war in Iraq hurt what the voters perceived. There is also a suggestion that the Club for Growth effort to question the Republican's record on taxes back-fired. I disagree on the latter. It seems to me that the Club for Growth people learned from 2003 that criticisms of candidates whom they, being Republicans, are presumed to support, are taken by the Republican electorate as examples of honesty, while Democrats are inclined to come to the defense of whoever is being attacked. So, for example, the ads taken out in Iowa 'against' Huckabee had the effect of increasing the public's awareness and increasing his poll numbers, regardless of his positions on issues.
What we might learn from this is that the DLC position, that all news about Democratic candidates needs to be positive, is perhaps not well taken. While it is true that Senator Clinton is the first former First Lady to be a presidential candidate, the apparent disregard of former Senator and Ambassador Carol Moseley Braun's efforts in 2004 strikes me as mistaken. And the Senator's assertion that she "thinks" herself
the best qualified and experienced person to do the job
strikes me as an example of poor judgement. In what sense is Senator Clinton more qualified and experienced than Senator Carol Moseley Braun?