In yesterday’s debate, Republican candidate for Senator of New York ‘accused’ Senator Hillary Clinton of having ‘Presidential aspirations’.
Clinton acknowledged that she has thought about running for the presidency in 2008, but said she is committed to running for Senate re-election.
Personally, I like how she transformed an ‘accusation’ (if that is the best you can come up with as an opponent, I am not sure whether you should consider running against Hillary at all) into a compliment:
“As you might guess, I’ve been asked that a few times before,” she said of her possible White House aspirations. “I am focused on this election. I am focused on my work in the Senate. Obviously, people are talking about whether I will or should be running for president, and I’m flattered by that.”
On a different note: I have been thinking about this every now and then: one could very well argue that – taking American history into regard and more specifically emancipation of African-Americans on one hand and of women on the other – it is more likely that a black man will be elected President before a white woman. On the other hand, one could also come to the opposite conclusion while looking at the same facts and – of course – one could be of the opinion that race and sex do not matter anymore regarding politics / elections. I am interested in reading what you all might think of this, so please leave a comment about that.
UPDATE
Great post by Henry at Crooked Timber. Henry quotes an article in the Economist. The quote:
But whatever the reason, [Warner’s] retreat has created a vacuum. He had positioned himself as the centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination and the darling of the party’s liberal activists. Southerners, Westerners and moderates are now shopping for a new candidate, perhaps Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico or Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana or former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the vice-presidential nominee in 2004.
Henry responds:
Hillary Clinton is apparently the “darling of the party’s liberal activists.â€? Now, we don’t have any really decisive evidence on this – the only surveys that I know of which try to figure out what “liberal activistsâ€? want are the Pew survey (which focuses on Howard Dean supporters) and the Blogpac survey, which draws from a sample of MoveOn email list subscribers. Neither is definitive – but Pew finds that Clinton polls number 4 or number 3 among former Dean activists depending on which question you look at, while the Blogpac survey finds her to be joint fifth with Joe Biden, and to have higher unfavourable ratings than any other listed candidate. Given that Clinton has specifically tried to position herself as the centrist alternative over the last couple of years, this is about what one would expect. Equally bizarre is the suggestion that centrists might want to gravitate towards John Edwards… I don’t get the impression that the article’s author actually knows very much about what’s happening within the Democratic party. Not what you expect from a serious magazine.
This ‘darling of the party’s liberal activists’ is something I do not get either. Seems to be more of a talking point, meant to ‘discredit’ Hillary, than anything else to me.
