My comment: The right is well aware that they have a steep uphill climb to the White House in 2008. If Hillary becomes the Democratic nominee, then that would be cause for elation for the conservatives. And here are the reasons why.
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Was Hillary wise to confront Gen. Petraeus?
September 18, 2007
STEVE HUNTLEY shuntley@suntimes.com
Hillary Clinton's confrontation with Gen. David Petraeus in questioning the credibility of his Iraq report to Congress represented the kind of political gamble that calculates a near-term win won't add up to a long-term loss.
The good news for Clinton was that her telling Petraeus his positive progress report on the military surge required "a willing suspension of disbelief" scored her points with the influential Democratic anti-war left that has been unhappy with her refusal to apologize for voting to authorize the invasion of Iraq.
Her high-profile questioning of the general's credibility also had the plus of pushing out of the media spotlight the embarrassing campaign funding episode in which the Democratic presidential candidate returned a staggering $850,000 in donations raised by Norman Hsu, a prodigious money bundler who turned out to be a fugitive from justice. That case harkened back to some of the fund-raising excesses of the Bill Clinton presidency. Remember the selling of the Lincoln Bedroom?
The bad news for Clinton is that what plays well in a primary campaign can come back to haunt a candidate hunting independent and Republican votes in a general election. What's more, her upbraiding of Petraeus refreshes memories of widely circulated reports in the 1990s of the military's unease with President Bill Clinton because he was perceived as draft dodger during the Vietnam War.
In her career in the U.S. Senate, Clinton has labored mightily to shore up her credentials as a supporter of the military, but with a few brief words she conjured up ghosts of Hillary past, shoveling fresh red meat to Clinton haters.
The timing wasn't auspicious, either. Her questioning of Petraeus came a day after the radical MoveOn.org organization, founded to oppose the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky scandal by calling on the country to "move on" beyond it, ran a repugnant full-page ad in the New York Times accusing Petraeus of cooking the Iraq numbers so falsely that he deserved to be called "General Betray Us." Clinton was challenging the credibility of a four-star, highly decorated and well-regarded military officer at the same time the feverishly anti-war crowd was calling him a traitor.
If Clinton and her advisers didn't see the potential linkage there, Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani certainly did and pounced on it. The former New York mayor demanded that the Times let him buy ad space to answer MoveOn.org. The newspaper, perhaps a little embarrassed it had published an ad that crossed the lines of political decency and had accorded MoveOn.org a generous discount rate to boot, agreed to Giuliani's request with the same discount price. Giuliani's full-page ad accused Clinton of "spewing political venom" and "defending MoveOn.org."
One wonders why Clinton and her advisers saw fit to raise the political stakes now. After all, she appeared to have weathered the anti-war storm over her no-apology stand, and for months her lead in the polls has held firm over Sen. Barack Obama, who didn't disavow MoveOn.org but didn't provide a pungent sound-bite, either. The Hsu campaign funding dustup, while certainly embarrassing, revealed no wrongdoing on the part of Clinton or her staff.
How will her attack of the general's credibility look next summer if the military strategy scores further progress? Her questionable strategy places her in the uncomfortable position of seeming invested in bad news from Iraq. Clinton has run a smart, focused, error-free campaign. But her decision to take on Petraeus with the MoveOn.org ad hovering over the Iraq debate could turn out to be her first big blunder.
suntimes.com |
