Replies

Howie Carr column ping

Dems over the Hill
Clintons’ aging strategy has seen better days
By Howie Carr | Sunday, January 6, 2008 | http://www.bostonherald.com

Once again, Hillary Clinton is the victim of a vast conspiracy. This time, it’s a vast left-wing conspiracy.

How over the hill are Hillary and Bill when 70 percent of the caucus-goers in Iowa voted thumbs-down on her Thursday night? And now it appears she’ll get kicked to the curb again in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

Ouch. As Bill would say, better put some ice on that, baby.

This is a great weekend for those of us who never liked the first generation of trailer-park trash from Hope. And now what goes around comes around. The Clintons always fancied themselves so much cooler than those crusty old World War II Republicans, George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole. Now the Clintons are the dinosaurs. Did you see the people standing behind Hillary in Iowa on Thursday night during her concession speech?

Wesley Clark, Madeleine Albright, Terry McAuliffe - it looked like a new exhibit at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. The Clinton theme song has gone from “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” to “Yesterday.”

There is nothing more out than last season’s fad. Wait 20 years, everything comes back. Just don’t try to wear it to the cotillion this year. But that’s exactly what Hillary has been doing, and Friday night she was booed when she told the 3,000 Democrat hacks in Milford, N.H., that she would always be working for “change for you.”

Keep using that line, Hillary, and you will be working for change. Spare change.

If they only had more time, the Clintons could dig up dirt, some real mud, to throw at Obama. But this yearthey’re reduced to using ham-handed fools like Billy Shaheen and Bob Kerrey to peddle half-baked lies about Muslims and cocaine dealing. And now the clock works against them. It was the Clintons who wanted to front-load everything, to hold those early caucuses in Nevada and then get all the primaries over with. There’s an old saying: Be careful what you wish for.

You know a campaign is in trouble when the newspaper stories are full of phrases that are being used this weekend to describe Hillary’s campaign:

“Pointing fingers . . . second-guessing . . . sharpen the message . . . old hands . . . turmoil . . . question her strategy . . . infighting . . . top-heavy . . . shouting . . . missed opportunities . . . series of conference calls. . . .”

Now they’re stressing Hillary’s “experience.” Talk about running on empty.

Obama and Huckabee aren’t running campaigns, as someone noted Friday, they’re running movements.

Which is why a new word has suddenly entered this year’s political lexicon: “secular.” As in, “secular Republicans,” or, more generally, “secular voters.” Non-moonbats, in other words. For the GOP, it means voters for whom snakes are not part of their Sunday-morning religious services. For the Democrats, it means voters who don’t believe that 9/11 was a Bush-Cheney-Halliburton plot.

Another irony here: The Clintons were the first politicians to realize how dumbed-down the American electorate had become. It was Bill who figured out that even if Abe Lincoln was right, and you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, all you really need to fool is 49 percent, at least as long you can keep Ross Perot in the race.

Now, though, they’re angry because the voters are throwing them over for the new kid in town, the snake-oil salesman with an even smoother sales pitch.

As entertaining as this train-wreck is for Republicans, they should remember what the Germans did during World War I. They got the bright idea of sending Lenin back to Russia in a sealed railroad car, to sow revolution and bring down the Tsar. Short-term, a brilliant move by the Germans, long-term, not so hot.

Listen to what the Clinton people are saying about Barack and tell me it doesn’t sound like Tom Reilly’s minions talking about Deval Patrick in 2006:

“Everyone underestimated this conflagration,” one Clintonite told The Politico.

Now, in Massachusetts, we have a governor who believes in hope and opportunity. Just not snowplowing.

And Hillary is reduced to complaining about Iowa. She loves New Hampshire because “you’re not disenfranchised if you work at night.”

Poor Hillary. She’s forgotten that Clinton voters don’t work, period, let alone the second shift. Another sign of a dying dynasty, when you forget who your base is.

This is fun, pour another drink. We can all worry about the snow drifts in the morning.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/opinion/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1064810