Hillary's Campaign

Hillary Clinton

As expected, Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton has now joined the likes of Barak Obama, John Edwards, John Kerry and others in the Democratic Party who have presidential aspirations. Unlike the others in this group, she comes in as the favorite. Already she is well ahead of Obama, her only real challenger at this point, in New York. The latest poll numbers have her leading Obama 41% of likely Democratic voters to 17% for Barak. But, one important factor always gets lost in these early numbers, that is, it is only January 2007 and these numbers are meaningless at this stage of the game.

Anyone who has followed politics long enough can tell you that trying to predict an outcome of a race this early is like trying to predict next year's super bowl teams. Number's like everything else in life changes almost daily. We need to look no further than 1987 when George Bush had an approval rating in the single digits and it looked as if Gary Hart would just glide to a win. Well, for those of you who are too young to remember, Gary Hart got caught up in a sex scandal and George Bush had a sudden surge after he escaped the hangman's noose. And rest, as they say, is history. So there you go. There are some stark differences here, however. First, Hillary Clinton is too smart to get herself to another scandal. She learned those lessons from Bill and worked the audience like a rock star. Second, her advisors know how to play the game. Barak Obama just doesn't have weight to bring in the real political assassins like James Carville and don't think he isn’t already mapping a blue print for such a victories.

The irony in all this is that both candidates are, far as political policies are concerned, are mirror images of each other. They both straddle the middle of the road approach and never take a real stance on anything until they read the poll numbers. In fact, both of them voted for the ever war in Iraq that seems to have less support than that of the Vietnam War. Of coarse now to support the war is equal to political suicide they both have joined the antiwar camp in speaking against Bush. It is about time but, let’s not have allusions about it. Neither is talking about cutting off funding for the war which is the only way to end the massacre. Any non-binding resolutions that offer no cuts in funds will do nothing. Any message that the Democrats hope to send will be ignored by George W. Bush.

While she leads now in the race, her only chance to escape the primary will depend on two factors. First, how successful are her spin doctors going to be. James Carville will take care of that and he will probably work better with Hillary Clinton than he did with John Kerry who ran the worst campaign since Michael Dukakis. But Hillary Clinton seems to have same killer instincts that have husband did. Second, it will highly depend on if Al Gore decides to run again. Yes, he only as 10% of the vote right now but, he is not campaigning and as I mentioned above, any numbers are not really good indicators of future events.

But we will see. Until next time..

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