Posted on 07/30/2005 1:54:23 PM PDT by Tumbleweed_Connection
Although the next presidential race is three years away, Americans are constantly being asked whom they want to see in the White House next time. A few weeks ago came a startling new development: for the first time a majority of those polled said they were likely to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The most optimistic observers now talk of a contest between the two most charismatic people in US politics, Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice. Dick Morris, a former adviser to Clinton, will bring out a book this October called Condi v Hillary: the Next Great Presidential Race. Such a scenario would indeed be an incredible turnaround for American women, given that it is more than 20 years since the only time a woman has been put forward by a major political party in the presidential race: Geraldine Ferraro's failed vice-presidency bid in 1984.
Article continues But the candidacy of Condoleezza Rice is still a distant dream. That of Hillary Clinton is a far more likely prospect, but it won't be an easy ride. For her the problems lie not so much in the political arena as the personal.
Observers have been impressed by how Clinton has played her last five years as a cool-headed senator. She has been carving out a position precisely calibrated for a presidential race in these conservative times, carefully distancing herself from positions that might seem too liberal. At the beginning of the year she sought "common ground" with pro-lifers on abortion, and described herself as a "praying person". Earlier this month she called for a crackdown on the sale of violent and sexual video games to children.
These are not just new crowd-pleasing ventures - such views have been part of her public persona for a long time. At the same time Clinton knows she will also have to challenge the Republicans on defence and security; she famously voted for the Iraq war and is spending, as one commentator put it, "hours mastering military arcana", as she must if she is ever to persuade Americans to take her seriously as commander in chief.
Such behaviour may alienate her most liberal supporters. But then Hillary was never the politician that radical feminists dreamed of. Just as the first modern woman leader in Britain had to be tougher than the boys to silence her critics, so the first woman US president will be harder than the men around her. It was all very well for Bill Clinton to show off his human side - everyone knew he was surging with testosterone. If Hillary were to do the same it would be seen as weakness.
Yet this necessity puts her in a bind. US culture may constantly throw up images of powerful females, but they are always seen as lacking something vital - not brains, nor guts, but heart. From Lara Croft to Catwoman, from Condi to Hillary, the power of the superwoman always seems to come at the expense of her perceived humanity. When commentators say that Hillary Clinton is too cold to win over voters, what they are really saying is that she is too powerful to be a real woman. Behaviour that would be forgiven in a man - wariness of confiding in others, self-belief - is seen as evidence of a hyper-ambition that makes her less than fully human.
US culture has not moved on from the idea that a woman who is so keen on power is also sexually deviant. In his vicious new book, The Truth About Hillary, Edward Klein jumps from her alleged promiscuity "Hillary and Vince's love affair was an open secret"; to her supposed frigidity - "Did the Big Girl have any interest in sex with a man?"; to her rumoured lesbianism - "To Arkansas, she walked like a lesbian, talked like a lesbian, and looked like a lesbian."
Whatever Hillary Clinton does to position herself politically, this dirt will keep coming. If she's lucky she will be able to rise above her detractors and speak directly to voters with a voice that seems both reassuring - because she's been around for so long - and new - because she is, after all, a woman. But if she's unlucky she will seem both old hat, tainted with the scandals of the Clinton era, and, as a powerful woman, way too revolutionary for current American society. Perhaps all Republicans will have to do to stop her succeeding is to remind voters that 13 years ago she said didn't want to spend her life baking cookies.
Because while surveys show growing numbers of American voters warming to her, a substantial minority - up to 40% in some polls - are still saying that their country is not ready for a female president. And whatever Hillary Clinton's own self-belief, it may still be beyond her power to change that.
PUSH POLL GARBAGE.
This is nothing more than the Hillary Handbook to Self Promotion.
Rule #1 in the Hillary book.
- Its all about Hillary
Rule #2
- USING your friends with the same world view, INVENT that "Millions" want Hillary and promote this in the press at all levels.
Rule #3
- ACT as if Hillary is really not interested. You see, the simple minds and the religious left will see this as evidence that there is a DEMAND for Hillary to save us all from the evile right.
Rule #4
- Ridicule anyone who states the above rules openly.
You bet.
All the stuff about her being a too strong woman for some people is baloney.
It's her lying socialist heart and treason that scare me.
The Truth about Her Highness.....MARY CAITRIN MAHONEY, White House intern, and as a lesbian was well aware of goings on inside the Clinton White House,including Hillary's apparent love affair with another White House woman, who was able to reportedly get top secrets from Hillary. Mahoney was murdered in a Starbucks Coffee Shop, right in the District of Columbia, July, 1997, and covered up by the FBI. It was a intelligence agency contract "hit" and the FBI is covering it up by blaming a "lone assassin", an FBI specialty. Newsweek reporter and reputed foreign intelligence agency asset, MICHAEL ISIKOFF, was working on getting details which led up to the murder of Ms Mahoney. If there was a proper grand jury inquiry into the Mary Mahoney murder, would Isikoff be a target? Was it just accidental that he reportedly caused her to be murdered? Isikoff's employer, Newsweek, is a British-owned firm tight with foreign intelligence agencies and dirty tricks, including disinformation. Isikoff's book, supposedly a best-seller, is a whitewash.Ms Mahoney reportedly knew about the Clinton-Wang Jun treason. In a reported conversation between MONICA LEWINSKY and LINDA TRIPP, discussed was they did not want to end up like Mary Mahoney, a sort of mutual understanding that people in the White House who know too much sometimes get murdered.
Would I vote for Hillary?????
NOT ONLY NO....BUT HELL NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah ... erp ... 'scuse me, I think I'm going to be s-i-i-i-ecccchhk!
That's a good point
We don't need Satan as president! She'll damn us all!
In case anybody missed it, Hitlery stopped her much-publicized march to the center long enough to vote with her leftist colleagues Kennedy, Kerry, Schumer, Boxer, and others against S.397, the bill to stop frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufacturers.
"I am who I am cause I am who I am..."
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