For the dems, who is there besides Hillary?

I think Bill is more liberal than Hillary is!

I don't think she has any hunger for the job. She reminds me of Gore. He didn't really act like he wanted it.

She is certainly more of a defense hawk, which is supposed to be a problem for Hillary this go round.

Terri Gross is the most polite but detailed in depth interviewer. I think Ms Clinton is a bit prickly and shown it a lot.

They are both motivated first by the attainment of power and position (politics) and secondly by setting policy and achieving outcomes (ideology)

Bill is by far the better politician, but Hillary is far more ideological. (and in their case the ideology is liberal).

Bill's a liberal of course, but much more a centrist than his wife. To some extent dragging the party towards the right was a political calculation, but Bill was well suited for that role. Whether or not it always was there or he developed his way of thinking while governing Arkansas, I can't say. I haven't read enough about his early years.

Ceding the matter of healthcare to Hillary during his first term probably had as much to do with his owing her something for sticking by him despite his philandering, as anything else, but I don't believe there is any indication that he was intent on establishing a single payer system. She was.

It's ironic that Hillary is described as a "hawk." By comparison to other Democrats, she may be "hawkish," but I think that this has been, largely, an attempt to counter the foolish notion that women can't be tough, which was even more prevalent when she first gained a position where anyone might care what she thought. Keep in mind too that she was hardly the lone voice among Democrats who announced support for the Iraq War.

According to Bob Gates, she told Obama that she did it for political reasons.

Hillary really believes it takes a village to raise a child.

Should she run and win the nomination and the White House, I think she will be seen as more of a hawk then Obama, but hardly one beating its wings and flexing its talons. Which party controls congress will determine how liberal her agenda will be. If its controlled by Democrats, we will defiantly see a very liberal Hillary. So I don't think you lefties should give up on her and jump to the Warren bandwagon just yet.

Hillary was a prime driver in us entering the Lybian civil war, argued and lost for us to go into Syria, and where as Gates wisely says that there is little we can do about Russia taking Ukraine Hillary is wanting a show down over Ukraine. I dont know where she stands on The Asia Pivot that never happened, but I would expect that the wants to confront China as well.

But America is exhausted with global military adventures, wise/needed or not. This is going to be a problem for her.

delusional.



I knew if I lived long enough...I'd agree with something you wrote...finally.

It is not just going to be a problem for her. It is a problem the whole world is facing. How the current and next Prez deals with this is a WORLD problem. No national or international leaders have the right answer/answers to these complex issues/issues. Lets recognize the seriousness and insolvability of what is going on.

Oh gosh I've just stumbled on Sarah Palins home address on the net and google earth, I think I'll send her a greeting card telling her how much we all admire her, and what a great President she'd make!
I hope I can write without my hand shaking too much..

I think George gets a pension from the military. He isent interested in cutting military spending.

Far-be-it for me to snap to Bill Clinton's defense...but...out of curiosity, what would you call the young Bill Clinton being a Rhodes Scholar in terms of developing his experience with Int'l politics and a developing his political philosophy?

Here's a clip from his biography:

"With the aid of scholarships, Clinton attended the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., receiving a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service (B.S.) degree in 1968. He spent the summer of 1967, the summer before his senior year, interning for Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright."

"Upon graduation, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics, though because he had switched programs and had left early for Yale University, he did not receive a degree there."

"After Oxford, Clinton attended Yale Law School and earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1973"

Its not a character flaw. Its knowing fact from fiction which Romio dosent.

That assumes that the folks running things even know what is going on, that they even get to the point of trying to come up with solutions. Almost no one foresaw Cantor losing, the 07/08 economic crash, Russia trying to take Ukraine, That the VA was cooking the books, that Bashar al-Assad would not fold up and go away, that taking out Gaddafi would throw Libya into chaos, that the ISIS would rampage through Iraq as the Iraqi Army folded, that Greece was cooking the books, that trying to get everyone possible to own their homes was not actually a good idea, that trying to get everyone possible a college degree is not actually a good idea (ok, we have not figured this out yet but we will, eventually).......

The masses being stupid and not interested in anything but immediate self interest, a mostly dead journalism corps, institutions having been allowed to get too big to be allowed to fail and also too big to manage effectively, systems being allowed to get too complex to manage....one person with good intentions is not nearly enough to counter all of that. Look at The Professor, he naively thought that he could take the chair and change things but look what happened to him. THe system chewed him up and spit him out, leaving him bitter and from recent accounts tired of being president.

THis is what awaits Hillary if she wants it. And she is no spring chicken. Sounds more like a nightmare than a dream.

Re Cantor's failed campaign: FWIW, the interesting factoid that I heard from broadcast media (perhaps NPR) was that Cantor had a political war chest of some $5m and chose not to spend much of it at all.

Whereas, his competitor had about $300k and campaigned like crazy. Assume, if you will, that those dollar amounts are in some ballpark of being accurate.

Whose fault is that - that he didn't take this campaign seriously enough? Whose fault is it that he mis-assessed his stand on the issue immigration reform? Whose fault is it that he chose such a negative approach to campaign?

It's not like his competitor's political skill or brain trust was unbeatable or an amazing candidate, by any means.

Cantor had no idea what was going on in his district, because he was rarely back home and did not care about his constituents. The does not explain why no one else foresaw the result. Reports have it that all of his staff were equally as clueless, and we know that the R's in Washington and the journalists were as well.

One day Cantor is expected to be the next speaker, the next he is voted out of office.

One day Bear Stearns is a titan of Wall Street the next it is bankrupt and out of business.

One day the credit markets are fine and the next they are frozen.

One day Crimea belongs to Ukraine the next it is part of Russia

One day Mosul is run by the Baghdad and the next by the ISIS

AND ALMOST NO ONE SAW ANY OF THIS COMING!

That is a big problem.

I would say that I am aware of these impressive credentials but that they shed no light at all on how he developed his center-left ideology which was, of course, the subject of my post.

Sometimes A2K responses address the subject at hand and sometimes they address the specifics of a particular question . If you feel that I didn't address some of your question, then perhaps you might read what I wrote a bit closer.

Was his college education and degrees from politically conservative universities? What do you think the odds were that someone attending the universities and colleges he attended at the period of time he attended them would have him developing as a political conservative?

You have a President in GB. Did not know that.

And sometimes responses are framed as efforts (half-hearted or otherwise) in defense against imaginary attacks.

I could read your response all day, and it still wouldn't convince me his center left philosophy wasn't developed before he was governor of Arkansas. Surely you don't believe everyone who attended Oxford, Georgetown and Yale graduated as leftists do you? George Bush attended Yale. Mitch Daniels attended Georgetown, and C.S. Lewis not only graduated from Oxford, he taught there.

If it's your opinion that he didn't develop a center-left philosophy at any of these schools, that's fine, but I don't know, I haven't read, as I noted, enough about his early days.

Perhaps something is a bit off with your comprehension as I thought we were in agreement.
Certainly I feel his left-leaning tendencies were developed before his governorship.

However, that being said, what is the point of all that? What bearing does where he developed his particular philosophy have on the topic...or topics?

In my opinion, Frank Apisa, any personal attacks by the Republicans will backfire...Hillary has her defenders, don't forget. Also, the public did not take kindly to Senator McCain's referring to Hillary as a rerun of the "Golden Girls." (McCain was 72 when he first ran for the presidency in '08.)....Talking about a hypocritical double standard! And Karl Rove implying she had "brain damage" only to walk back his words when examined closely. The Republican Party did everything in its power to prevent a second-term Obama but still he won over Romney, even with restricted voting in minority areas. The GOP's political savagery against Obama was and still is much worse than it would be for Hillary who is female, but white!....(The US presidency has been taken for granted to be the exclusive preserve of the American white male.) I don't for one moment believe the GOP will let up on the vicious ad hominem attacks against Hillary's person, but by her own words, she is used to it, and a force in her own right to be reckoned with, especially against her opponents.