Writing about Sherrod Brown, who’s running for the senate seat in Ohio, Matt Yglesias talks about Brown avoiding cultural issues
Insofar as one can “handle” that dynamic at all, the only thing to do about it, I think, is to try and make sure you’re not in a permanent defensive crouch. On almost all the cultural issues, but especially on abortion, the typical situation is for both candidates to hold some unpopular views. Democrats seem to me to have gotten so afraid of the way cultural politics can hurt them that they’re desperate to avoid the entire debate, which involves never going on the offensive on these fronts.
Bingo. That’s the downside of President Clinton’s success. Democrats think that the path to victory is to make everyone happy, which will end up pleasing nobody at all.
Ironically, I don’t think that played any part in Clinton’s success. I think it was an unfortuneate part of his personality that was reflected in his political style.
From the time he told us all that he “tried marijuana but never inhaled” to the day he sought out the company of an emotionally-stunted intern, he was trying to be all things to all people.
We need a Harry Truman.
And this is the guy we got instead of a straight shooting Marine? Tell me again why Howard Dean deserves my money?
Truman was a farmer & then a haberdasher. He never earned a college degree. If Roosevelt hadn’t picked him as VP in 1944 (replacing the execrable Henry Wallace) I doubt that Truman would have been anyone’s choice to succeed FDR. I don’t think either party would ever nominate a man with his mediocre background again.
grendelkhan: What straight shooting marine?
Quaker: I agree with you. I don’t think Clinton’s people-pleasing skills were related to his superb performance as president, but I think a lot of people have assumed that the two went hand in hand.
Stick
I am incredulous at your preternatural affinity for peripheral
blindness.
“I don t think either party would ever nominate a man with his mediocre background again.”
Need I recount the legion of enablers who cast a safety net to
retrieve the erstwhile ‘businessman’ GWB?
Semanticleo-
Bush has an MBA from Yale. Truman had no college degree. Your response to my comment lacks something called logic. You can probably read all about logic using any one of many online resources.
I had a higher SAT scores and grade point average than the president, and I could not get into Yale. Nice try stick. You can use that pesky thing called logic, and surmise that he got in to Yale based on his dad and not his intellegence or work ethic. I know you guys have a Harlequin Romance novel love for the Prez but please! If this guy has a legitamate degree from Yale, than I wrote the book on business pratices.
Frank_D:
Paul Hackett
Whale, where can I get your book?
No question being a legacy will help get you into the ivy league. But it won’t get you out. It also won’t get you out of an MBA program.
I will grant you he had help getting in, but he worked his own way out…with a better GPA than john f’ing kerry too…
Grend:
I agree. Hackett should have gotten the full support of the Democratic Party.
Stick: Truman often said he never wanted to be President.
Whenever I think about Bush at Yale, it reminds me of Animal House, where Kent/Flounder is accepted into Delta house because “he’s a legacy”.
Y’all have missed the point. President Clinton pointed the way to Democratic presidential victories by running as a moderate, so as not to alienate the South and the Mountain Time Zone West. You can insist on the ideological purity of Howard Dean all that you want — and then be surprised, again, when you are on the outside looking in, wondering what happened.
Remember how Bill Clinton campaigned in 1992: during a time of massive deficit spending, he campaigned on the promise of a “middle class tax cut.” Yeah, he was lying through his scummy teeth, and had no intentions of enacting it, but that’s how he campaigned. He campaigned on reforming welfare, and, with the help of the Republican majority, actually did it. He made a special trip back to Arkansas to sign a death warrant for a retarded prisoner. Other than on abortion, he ran to the right of the first President Bush.
Y’all like to note that Vice President Gore won the popular vote in 2000; there was another candidate running on a tax cut! (Mr Gore’s proposed tax cut was about half the size of George Bush’s.)
Well, y’all had candidates in 2004 who said, right out front, that they were going to raise taxes, primarily Dr Dean and Richard Gephardt. They ran in free, democratic primary elections — and your own party decided to choose John Kerry, who was running on, you guessed it, a tax cut! (Oh, he was going to raise taxes on the wealthy, but if you check, he had yet another middle-class tax cut in his campaign.)
But please, nominate a true believer, nominate a wild-eyed leftist who wants to raise taxes.