Free Republic

Bill Clinton’s connections, and his endless supply of chits, only begin to capture his singular role in his wife’s presidential candidacy, advisers and friends of the couple say. He is the master strategist behind the scenes; the consigliere to the head of “the family,” as some Clinton aides refer to her operation; and a fund-raising machine who is steadily pulling in $100,000 or more at receptions. So far, his roles have unfolded in private as he provides ideas to his wife and makes sure she paces herself, and as he acts as something of a field general with donors, instructing...

Rudy Giuliani became what was once known as a "Reagan Democrat" in 1980, when he switched his party registration from the consciously ambiguous New York City "Independent" to the bold and rare New York City "Republican." Giuliani remembers his conversion as a response to the inspiring candidacy of Ronald Reagan, who that year overwhelmed the struggling President Jimmy Carter to become the 40th President. Now that Rudy Giuliani is running for the Republican nomination for President ("Yes, I'm running. Sure.") and quoting Ronald Reagan enthusiastically ("The future belongs to the free."), it is compelling to look again at 1980 for...

Crowd laughs at Hillary in Iowa "I have a lot of experience dealing with evil bad men." Crowd erupts in laughter.Laughing at her, not with her. http://www.foxnews.com/video2/player06.html?012807/012807_studiob_cameron&FNL&Campaigning%20in%20Iowa&acc&Politics&-1&News&224&&&exp

You can measure the scale of an American president’s troubles by the number of skutniks he deploys during his State of the Union address. Every year during his big set-piece speech to Congress, the president will digress from the main thrust of his remarks to offer fulsome praise to some member of the audience in the gallery. This person will have been carefully selected in advance by the president’s speechwriters as an exemplar of some virtue and placed there for the purpose. The television producers will have been alerted in advance so that at the right moment, as the president...

http://foolishpleasurestudio.com/eyewool/slap_hillary.html

GOP Senate hopeful Kathleen Troia "KT" McFarland said yesterday her father threatened her with a gun "on a couple of occasions" when she was a child - and wondered whether recent revelations about her past made it impossible for her to continue to run. McFarland said that news accounts about her upbringing, and how parental abuse may have contributed to her brother's death from AIDS in 1995, was "another form of abuse" - leaving her to wonder if she should abandon her quest to unseat Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Love her position on the war or hate it, you can’t argue that she’s waffled. And isn’t that what we want in a politician? Here is senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in December 2003: “Now that we’re [in Iraq], we have no choice. We own this issue. There is no doubt that we’re going to be there for years,” and “Whether you agreed or not that we should be in Iraq, failure is not an option.” Here she is in November 2005: “I do not believe that we should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end. Nor...

Bill and Hillary Clinton flew to Chicago together last month to deliver speeches a few hours and a few miles apart. And like any couple, they thought about having dinner at day's end. But life is not so simple when you are married to a Clinton. The former president kept a low profile and left early for Washington, in part to avoid distracting the news media from his wife's speech. They decided later that dinner would not work, so Mr. Clinton did what he often does: He rounded up some familiar faces — former aides including Joe Lockhart and Mike...