Hillary says Dems need security blanket (NY Daily News In Full Fawning Mode)

NY Daily News ^ | April 12, 2005

[presidio9]

It's not news that the junior senator from the State of New York has been making a point of distancing herself from her party's way-out-there-in-left-field flank ever since November's election debacle. She has talked about the importance of prayer, and of finding common ground on abortion, and of the depredations of the media on children. Yesterday, though, sitting down with the Daily News Editorial Board in the wake of the weekend Minneapolis speech that point-blank posited her as the future of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton made things even more crystal-clear: Too many Dems just plain don't get it. And that's why they lost the presidential race last year.

Party leaders had it wrong all along, she said: It really was about national security, stupid. National security post-9/11 trumped all, and was far more important to the outcome of the contest than the widely accepted belief that the Republicans had won the day based on being in touch with red state "values."

Said the senator: "Security was the issue. It was the issue from the beginning. How could it be anything else after 9/11? It was the paramount issue. If you are not secure and if you can't persuade a majority of people that you are going to be strong and tough where we need to be to protect America and our interests, you can't cross the threshold."

Said the senator: "What I am doing is helping to frame some of these security, international issues in a different way, so that other Democrats can say, 'Well, that makes sense.'"

Dead right, senator. The election was about about waking up alive and breathing in cities that were not reduced to heaps of smoking cinders. That's what it was about. That's what it's still about.

If the Deans and the Boxers and the Kennedys and the Kerrys somehow cannot bring themselves to comprehend the elegant simplicity of this, Clinton has, we observe, just officially staked out her claim to the sentiments of most of the American people.

And, whether or not she intends to unveil herself as a presidential candidate three years from now - and the lady isn't saying - we think thoughtful Dems would do well to listen up.