Posted on 06/13/2006 6:23:18 PM PDT by Jean S
Angry boos greeted Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) at a liberal conference yesterday when she opposed fixing a date for withdrawing American forces from Iraq.
The sour audience response, at the Campaign for America’s Future conference, hints at the 2008 presidential front-runner’s shaky standing with anti-war Democrats, who wield increasing power in the party.
Clinton’s speech packed the room with a crowd billed as the nation’s largest gathering of progressives. But, although the left-leaning audience raucously cheered her domestic agenda, there was only a sprinkling of applause mixed with jeers when the senator refused to disavow her vote authorizing the Iraq war, as Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) did later in the day, renewing questions about possible fallout from her assiduous appeals to centrist voters.
“Our job is to do everything we can to help this [Iraqi] government succeed,” Clinton said to the silent audience. She rapped President Bush’s “open-ended commitment” to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq but added, “Nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain” for leaving.
At that, shouts erupted from the audience, dissipating only as Clinton turned back to the Democrats’ need to pursue alternative sources of fuel in response to high energy prices. When the senator, whose hawkishness on national security has alienated many liberals, urged Democrats to reach out to “people who may not yet agree with us,” a chant flared up in the hall: “Bring the troops home!”
Clinton was not the only 2008 hopeful to stray yesterday from the nascent Democratic orthodoxy of a quick exit from Iraq. Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack also dismissed calls to set a troop withdrawal date at a briefing that likely previewed his remarks to the liberal conference. As The Hill reported last month, Clinton and Vilsack have both also declined to echo their party’s calls for the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
This year’s conference has become a breakthrough moment for the Campaign for America’s Future. Having started as a small-scale progressive push for a greater voice in Clinton administration policy, the Campaign has grown during the Bush presidency into a thrumming factory for Democratic policy.
“The Campaign has been very helpful and effective in a whole series of campaigns dealing with access to healthcare, the cost of student loans, the minimum wage, corporate corruption,” Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.) said in an interview before addressing the conference on education. “They have used peoples’ connection with those issues as organizing tools … in all different kinds of congressional districts.”
Campaign co-director Roger Hickey cast his group and its allies, from MoveOn.org to USAction, as a winning counterweight to the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and other centrist forces.
“The lesson we drew from the Clinton administration is that the progressive wing of the Democratic Party … needs to be better organized in order to be heard, especially given the influence of groups like the DLC and corporate influence in general,” Hickey said.
Yet Democratic unity was a pervasive theme of the conference, which opened with a new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll that the Campaign touted as proof of the electorate’s realigning away from conservatism and toward progressivism. In fact, the poll showed a generic preference for Democrats over Republicans but a continued advantage for political conservatives over progressives.
“What we’re seeing now is incredible unanimity among Democrats and increasingly among Americans who have rejected all the signature issues of the Bush presidency,” Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has appeared at several past Campaign conferences, said in an interview.
DLC senior fellow Marshall Wittmann pointed out that Democrats have difficult work ahead, even as many party leaders cast plummeting Republican approval ratings as a harbinger of victory in the fall midterms.
“The danger to the Democratic Party right now is, they’re lurching to the left and leaving behind the middle,” Wittmann said. “It’s to Hillary’s credit that she’s steering a centrist course even if it upsets some on the left, because that’s the only way the party is going to be back in control of Congress and win the White House.”
A column by author Norman Solomon questioning the Campaign’s labeling of Clinton as a “progressive leader” made the rounds yesterday among bloggers who attended the conference. “In the interests of truth-in-labeling, shouldn’t Hillary Clinton be described as anti-progressive?” Solomon wrote.
Hickey, meanwhile, reiterated the Campaign’s view of liberals as Democratic leaders — “The Democratic Party is a big tent, but the vast majority of Democrats are progressives” — and recalled last year’s successful fight against Bush’s Social Security plan.
“There was a time when the DLC supported privatization of Social Security. You don’t hear them talking about that very much because we have basically won that battle,” Hickey said. “There may or may not be [the] same debate on foreign policy, with the DLC saying the party ought to support the administration on Iraq.”
Hickey cited Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) as the “epitome” of centrist compromise. Lieberman’s surging Democratic primary foe, Ned Lamont, tied his evening fundraiser to the conference.
Clinton’s speech may have laid bare the Democrats’ internal fault lines over the war, but Democratic overconfidence became another contentious conference issue. While Campaign co-director Robert Borosage warned in The Nation this week that “nothing could be more pernicious” than Democrats’ expecting to take back Congress on the strength of low presidential approval, the air was thick with anticipation of a new majority.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by California Democratic Reps. Barbara Lee and Lynn Woolsey, hung a hopeful banner on its exhibition table: “If the House majority flips in November, half of chairs of 20 standing House Committees will be Progressive Caucus members. PLUS, An additional 31 Congressional Progressive Caucus members will be subcommittee chairs.”
Progressive Caucus policy adviser Bill Goold said the conference was “a golden opportunity” to connect left-leaning lawmakers with grassroots liberal networks outside Washington. Goold pointed to the group’s series of ad hoc hearings on U.S.-Iranian relations, the latest of which will take place next week.
The ultimate goal, Goold said, is to “develop an alternative Democratic national-security strategy,” separate from but “supplementary to” the security plan that Pelosi and other party leaders unveiled this spring.
“It’s a very hard thing to modulate,” said Matt Bennett, communications director on Gen. Wesley Clark’s 2004 presidential campaign and a co-founder of the new centrist group Third Way. “On the one hand, you definitely don’t want to measure drapes. On the other hand, you’ve got to look confident and got to be able to talk to people about what will happen if they vote for you.”
Clinton, in her speech, similarly called on Democrats to amplify their talk of an affirmative agenda, as did House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who proudly recalled her own vote against the war in Iraq.
When Clinton called U.S. troops “the best we have to offer,” she received a few small cheers and loud cries of “No!” from the conference audience. Pelosi made her own plea to support the troops and received a thunderous ovation.
Either her union goon squad doesn't rough up the dissenters in the crowd anymore or she wanted the outbursts so she'd seem "centrist".
I think it's the second one.
She's gonna have to choose her side of the fence one of these days...
Goodbye Hitlery!
This helps her. If the moonbat portion of the donkey party were enough of a voting block to take the nomination, Howard Dean wouldn't have been trounced so badly.
By showing up and allowing the nuts to boo her, she can do a little good old fashioned triangulation and postion herself to the right of the moonbats and stil have sufficient cover to criticize Bush.
If she figures out a way to make people forget that she's a petty, mean sprited, mendacious harpy, she'll take the White House.
The dem party is split between the far left and the moderates within the party. Poor Hillary is having hell trying to pander to both camps. BTW, I hope the far left actually wins the battle to take over the dem party.
..which was followed within hours by the largest unexplainable mass suicide ever in Fort Marcy Park along the George Washington Parkway in nearby Northern, VA.
They are a litte slow on the uptake.
booooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Don't worry she's a true blue hammer & sickle democRAT. Just doesn't want it noised around too much.
Hillary knows that she can't win without centrist support. She's probably betting that the Left will turn out to vote against a conservative.
She doesn't even need the Left for funds anymore either, as she's made enough friends in the upper echelons of society to fund her campaigns and ensure a steady flow of cash into her war chest.
Of course, once she wins the White House, the Left will be very happy when she sheds her centrist cloak and dons her man-suit and cup.
So this is something she can't put behind her, as the US will be in Iraq through (at least) the end of the decade.
She had no chance in the '08 general, now I'm beginning to seriously question whether she can even keep the DUmmie nomination.
The criminally insane not agreeing with the dumbass insane...
I have to hand it to these charlatans at the very least they are politically smart. Maybe too smart...
She lacks the ability that Bill Clinton, the man known as her husband and a former president, had for being able to triangulate his way around issues.
Or decamp en masse to the Greens.
Foxnews.com has a video of the booing.
"--I hope the far left actually wins the battle to take over the dem party."
I think they already have.
I agree - she's hunting for her Sister Souljah moments.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.