As I noted on my blog, it’s actually Hillary Clinton’s party. It certainly looks like her nomination if she wants it. And it looks like she does.
Ms. Clinton blitzed through my home town this week, lapping up a cool million dollars or so out of swooning Hollywood Democrats. This is, of course, how real-life politics are conducted in this country. Take your name recognition, mix in your network of entrenched party operatives, hacks and local elected officials, water it with plenty of campaign cash a-coupla-three years out, and eventually make yourself “inevitable.” Or “electable” (Remember that one?).
Hillary’s early and aggressive campaigning underlines the teeny-weeny, itsy-bitsy problem the lefty “progressive” side of the party has: namely, it does not control the Democratic Party (in spite of protestations to the contrary from MoveOn.org).
This week, for, um, like the umpteenth time in the last handful of years, there’s another one of those "Take Back America" meetings happening in Washington D.C. You know, a thousand or so mad-as-hell liberals who all mightily agree with each other crowd into a big ballroom and then make thunderous speeches to each other about how this time, this time for sure, they’re going to prevail. These political pep rallies are supposedly what they call “energizing.”
Frankly, it’s hard to imagine these friends of mine (some of them at least) winning back America if they can’t even win back their own party. Even when one of their own is supposedly running it nowadays. As David Corn pointed out, neither DNC Chair Doctor Dean nor former VP candidate John Edwards even mentioned the word “Iraq” when they addressed the liberal pow-wow (Am I just getting old or do I actually remember Dean campaigning on this issue last year?).
Actually it was left to our own hostess, Arianna, to bring up that distasteful subject. Not much of a surprise, really.
The official Democrat policy on Iraq has been almost indistinguishable from the Republican, so why bother?
I'm not arguing that Dean and Edwards should have called for Troops Out Now (a position that I’m rather dubious about)… but you’d think they would have something to say on an enterprise costing a billion dollars a day and a couple of thousand American lives. Something. Anything?
Hillary, of course, didn’t show at the Take Back America confab. Why should she? She knows very well that if she runs for president, about 99.9% of the people in that room are going to vote for her anyway. Isn’t that what progressives always do? Bitch for four years about the "rightward drift" of the party and then vote for the nominee, whomever it is?
For more than a half-year now since the presidential election, liberal Democrats have held endless rounds of closed-loop, self-referential meetings, meet-ups, rallies and conferences with each other vowing to win a new majority. So when are they going to go out there and start talking to all those others folks they have to convince? And what are they going to say? And who are they going to run?
The last time I bothered to check, there were no real grass-roots political parties in America. There were only campaign vehicles. While the progs spent all week cooped up in a beltway hotel talking to each other, Hillary was busy inflating her war chest. A million smackeroos in 24 hours? Now, that’s really energizing.