Take Back America Conference Day Three (But Day Two For Me)

I managed to get to the conference early enough to hear Hillary Clinton speak. (Note to Campaign for America’s Future, the coffee was delicious, thanks!)

Hillary's speech was about her running against George Bush. It’s a “front-runner’s” speech. It’s not hard to make a favorable comparison between yourself and Bush but she’s not running against Bush, she’s running against Obama and Edwards and the other people. But that’s a front-runner’s prerogative. Don’t stand out, don’t make comparisons between yourself and other primary candidates because you don’t want to lose your lead.

But the line that caught my ear right away was that Hillary was blaming the Iraqis for the chaos in Iraq. I don’t have the exact transcription yet but you can see the video online yourself. It went something like “we gave them a chance and they didn’t lead, so it’s time for us to go.” Frankly I was surprised to hear her use that line of logic, which is a pretty neocon line of thinking. So she rightly got booed. So of course that *that* becomes the story “Hilary got booed for saying the military succeeded” and progressives have to spend effort defending either the booers, or progressives, or Hillary against the smear…so now we can’t spend time actually focusing on hitting her for using that line. Yes we can walk and chew gum at the same time but there’s only going to be one or two narratives about her speech which is already being formed.

I’m not at all that interested in having Hillary Clinton be the Democratic candidate but if she had decided to use her speech to say something surprising I might have reconsidered. She didn’t surprise me though. She made a speech to compare her future administration against Bush’s and then used a line of neocon logic to explain why we should leave Iraq. It was rather bizarre posturing. Yes she’d be better than Bush but would she be better for the country than Edwards or Obama (or Richardson, or Dodd)? That’s what I would like to hear her explain. But she won’t until she feels she not a front-runner anymore.

More later...