Given Markos Moulitsas’s hard stand against Hillary Clinton in last year’s primaries and given the Netroots’ strong overall preference for Barack Obama, what do you make of Bill Clinton’s decision to give the Keynote Address at next week’s Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh? Are the Clintons looking to heal wounds with the activist base? For what purpose?
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
It’s a microphone, and an audience that loves what he loves — politics, even inside-baseball politics that makes ordinary people’s eyeballs glaze over.
It’s like Induction Week at Cooperstown.
I don’t think it’s anything more calculated than that.
The Big Dog got some credibility back after the North Korea jaunt. Perhaps he thinks that will give him a bit of an opening to mend fences a bit?
For all his screwups, he does know how to play the game and has much to offer. An audience like NN would take it all in, even if they don’t agree with it all.
I keep wondering how Bill Clinton manages to avoid being held accountable for undoing the Glass-Steagall legislation that kept investment banks from getting carried away. He signed the bill and then gave the gold-plated pen he used to Citibank CEO Sandy Weill. And look at the results….
Simply put, the DLC is passe. Playing the Reagan centrist, who even went so far as to get on the racist, antiBlack bandwagon (changing welfare as we know it) to get himself elected, is no longer in vogue. The left wing is back and he’s ready to embrace it. Bill underestimated the power of the netroots community. Anything to get on top. By 2016, Hillary will look too haggard to get elected. This just means that Hillary will be a last chance candidate in 2012, yes against Obama, again.
Slick Willie is Slick Willie. How else can he make Hillary a president?
Just some thoughts.
She’s not primarying Obama. No way.
I voted for Obama in both the primary and general elections. But if Hillary ran against Obama in 2012 I’d vote for her in a heartbeat.
One of the reasons Hillary lost last time around was because she felt entitled to the throne and failed to take care of business when it counted. One of Obama’s current flaws is that he is convinced we have nobody else to support so he can feed us bullshit all day long and know that we’ll still be there next morning. Both those attitudes can get you dumped and I’d be more than happy to show Mr. Obama exactly how the process works.
Hm, I agree with the sentiment, though I’m not sure that I’d be inclined to think that Hillary Clinton would be any improvement. As more than one astute observer noted during the lead-up to the Democratic convention, the differences between Obama’s and Clinton’s policy positions were not all that significant. My preference for Obama, when it comes down to it, had a lot more to do with my distaste for Bill Clinton than anything to do with Hillary. The candidate I actually preferred was John Edwards, though in retrospect I’m glad he didn’t win the nomination, for obvious reasons.
So far as I can tell, there are no Democratic politicians on the horizon whose potential candidacies provoke even a glimmer of enthusiasm in me. I’ll take pretty much any Democrat over any Republican, sure, but that’s just an attempt to slow the decline. What I’d prefer is a real revolutionary leftist — something like the words John Edwards was fond of using in his last go round, but with actual substance and character to back them up.
Relax, I’m not holding my breath.
If only Bernie Sanders was ten years younger!!
so agreed.
Wish there were someone I felt like voting FOR.
I don’t think that Hillary would be an improvement in terms of policy, style, or any matters of real substance. The quality of her staff would probably be more of a lateral shift rather than a vertical one. The big gain as far as I’m concerned would be that we’d jettison all that corny “hope” and “change comes to Washington, not from it” bullshit. We’d be back in the world of real politics and I could go to sleep at night not feeling betrayed. I voted for Obama because I thought he could be a “Mt. Rushmore” kind of President. But every day since January 20 he has shown me that he only wants to be a “Wheaties Box” kind of leader (and not a particularly memorable one of those).
For what it’s worth, Edwards was my first choice as well. Talk about mis-reading the candidate pool…
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Have you been living on a different planet in another time dimension or just keeping busy on your job. Missed your input in recent diaries on the I/P development, or lack thereof! Good to see your comment again.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Speculations, nothing more. When the Republicans get through with Obama, however, Hillary will be looking more electable. Her sour demeanor suggests to me that she is not happy in the SOS role. Whatever, she will lose.
Life caught up with me for a while, hence my absence. Thanks for noticing.
Has she ever had any other public demeanor? I doubt that’s how she means to come off, and I also doubt that’s an accurate reflection of her actual personality, but she’s pretty much always been that way in public.
Besides, have we ever had a cheerful Secretary of State? It’s not the kind of job that encourages a great deal of levity. Maybe if Obama had appointed her to be Secretary of Transportation instead, she could crack some side-splittingly hilarious jokes about railway crossing barriers.
You’re probably right, Corvus. But she did want to be the first female American president, and if it were not for Obama’s appeal, she would have been. Bill’s frustration was also evident. I can’t help thinking that they believe there’s still hope.
Is he getting paid? Will there be free food? Any women to look at?
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Over at Booman Tribune, an international blog for the “progressive community,” a new entry rebutting the former President acknowledged that “Hillary didn’t want war,” but offered little empathy: “The Big Dog can cry me a river. His wife gave the keys to the neo-cons and she knew better. Just like Kerry, she thought her future presidential viability depended on getting on the right side of a war.”
Clinton was smart to notice the “antiwar crowd on the Internet,” but their priority is foreign policy, not history.
Netroots Nation Conference to be held in Pittsburgh.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There’s not much mystery here. Bill Clinton is a self-indulgent narcissist who’s been invited to speak before a bunch of people, about half of whom admire him and the other half of whom are willing to tolerate him. What more could he possibly ask for? (That was a rhetorical question; please refrain from offering any suggestions that would cause me to toss my cookies.)
As for Markos, there’s no mystery here, either. He’s preached loud and long about the self-inflicted injuries of the left and its inherent fractiousness. A united left has a better chance of undoing 30 years of conservative rule.
Of course, that’s conservative rule that included the Clinton presidency, but the great shrieking irony that is the Third Way aside, Clinton is no longer in a position to drive policy, so it’s distantly possible that he might be willing to serve as an elder statesman figurehead for the new progressive movement. And since the list of required items for his dressing room is, at this point, positively tame compared to anything the current crop of Republican superstars might want, his potential for damage is pretty limited.
If the part of that 30-year rule proves anything it is that the nature of the Congress a president has to work with is very important. Only two of those Clinton years were under a congenial Congress, and that Congress consisted of Democratic politicians more in the tank with corporations than the current one, if that can be believed.
Under the circumstances, that Clinton accomplished anything at all in a still rampant conservative political culture is amazing. Welfare reform worked well enough as long as there were the education, transportation, child care, and healthcare services available to support the transition to work and an economy that was creating new jobs. It worked well enough that employers, afraid of having to raise wages, tanked the economy in 1999 by putting the pin in the IT bubble. Just as the CDS bubble got the pin as soon as it was likely that a Democrat might win the presidency. The underlying problem can be an unstated item, but it is interesting to see when it becomes an open worry.
About Clinton and Markos’s motivations. Markos gets a big name that lends more credibility to Netroots Nation as a political player. Clinton gets to play former president. Whether Hillary runs depends on whether a real healthcare bill passes; if it fails, she’s in.
There is little doubt that he will be warmly received. (I’ll be there to verify that.) Perhaps he really is seeking to heal things after the contentious campaign. But there really is no down side for him.
When I heard he was going to be there, I wished I had signed up to go. I would have loved to see him.
In spite of all of his faults (which are many), he is a pretty darn good politician. And there are lots of us out here that still love him.
(And I supported Obama the whole time, but still love the Big Dog.)
Clinton wants attention. He’s trying to get back into the limelight.