Bad for the Country, and for My Numbers
NYT OP ED
By Tobin Harshaw
Tags: Hillary Clinton, polls, terrorism
In the Democratic presidential race, it's been a week of ambiguously controversial remarks. Michelle Obama got things going with "if you can't run your own house …", and now The New York Post reports that Hillary Clinton, in a New Hampshire appearance, had this to say about a potential devastating terrorist attack on the United States: "It's a horrible prospect to ask yourself, 'What if? What if?' But if certain things happen between now and the election, particularly with respect to terrorism, that will automatically give the Republicans an advantage again, no matter how badly they have mishandled it, no matter how much more dangerous they have made the world."
For the right wing, this looks like fish in a barrel: "Got that? Another terrorist attack in the next year or so on American soil would be horrifying to think of, because it might give the GOP an election-year advantage," writes Jules Crittenden.
"That the sitting Senator of the state which suffered the greatest number of losses on 9-11 would make these kinds of blatantly self-serving remarks about the possibility of another terrorist attack happening before the 2008 elections are very telling as to what her priorities are, and they have nothing to do with protecting the American people, but instead protecting Hillary Clinton's chances of getting elected to serve as the first female president and Commander in Chief."
More surprising is the reaction among some of the more thoughtful members of left side of the Web. Matt Yglesias at The Atlantic thinks it's "a disaster":
"Two points in response. The first is that I think the Democrat best positioned to deal with GOP political mobilization in a post-attack environment is going to be the one who isn't reflexively inclined to see failed Republican policies resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Americans as a political advantage for the Republicans. The other is that I think there's a pretty clear sense in which the further one is from Bush's Iraq policy, the easier it is politically to say that the failures of Bush's national security policy should be blamed on Bush's failed policies. Obama has a straight shot ("this is why we should have fought al-Qaeda like I said") and Edwards (and Matt Yglesias) has a straightish one ("this is why we should have fought al-Qaeda like I think in retrospect") whereas I'm not 100 percent sure what the Clinton message would be. Most of all, though, I think the politics of national security call for a strong, self-confident posture that genuinely believes liberal solutions are politically saleable and substantively workable, not the kind of worry-wort attitude that says we need to cower in fear every time Republicans say "terror." |
