Two articles of interest: Jonathan Alter and E.J. Dionne on how Obama & Michelle are really the Clintons 17 years ago...and passing the torch as the Clintons fade off as elder statesmen. This "meme" was also repeated on MSNBC this morning by Joe Klein and Mike Barnacle. The old Clintons passing on the torch to the younger generation.
Here's snips from the two articles by Alter and Dionne:
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Jonathan Alter
How Tomorrow Became Yesterday"Grit, resolve, displays of character under pressure are the keys to correcting course," says one senior Clinton adviser, who, like all those talking after her devastating loss in Iowa, spoke only on background. Bill Clinton set the template for that in 1992 as "The Comeback Kid" after he bounced back from womanizing and draft-dodging stories to finish second in New Hampshire and relaunch his campaign. The idea now is for Hillary to hunker down for a long struggle where she chips away at Obama's stature. With the media always looking for a new narrative, some upset somewhere is all but inevitable.
But the Clintons' efforts to have the Democratic Party front-load the primaries (the idea being that Hillary could wrap it up quickly and concentrate on the fall campaign) has boomeranged badly. Hillary has only a month to get her groove fully back. If Walter Mondale had to campaign with this schedule in 1984, Gary Hart would have been the nominee.Another problem with the 1992 analogy is that Obama is no Paul Tsongas, the eat-your-peas winner of New Hampshire that year who was easy prey on Super Tuesday when he gave Clinton an opening on Social Security and Medicare. Hillary will continue her efforts to depict Obama as possessing an inferior health-care plan that lacks mandates and thus would not insure everyone. But Obama has successfully countered that you shouldn't be forced to buy something you cannot afford, and he has plenty of money to put this defense on the air.
Where Clinton might have a little more success is on the economy, which seems to be headed for a recession. Her husband managed to tap into anxiety about sluggish growth and the global economy without reverting to the anticorporate message of a John Edwards, which Clinton saw as part of the Democratic Party's past. We'll see if Obama can do that—and match it with concrete plans for the economy—but in the meantime his positions as a "New Democrat" are mostly indistinguishable from those of the Clintons. With Edwards now representing less than a third of Democrats (if Iowa, a strong union state, is to be believed), Clintonism has already been vindicated.
The Clintons themselves are a different matter. For all the talk of "Clinton Redux" or "Clinton Fatigue," another possibility might be "Clinton Irrelevance"—where Bill is beloved as an elder statesman and global citizen with much to contribute (his foundation has already raised hundreds of millions to fight AIDS and other global afflictions), and Hillary settles in as a widely respected senator.
In that scenario, the Clintons are part of America's past and present but not at the center of its future. Tomorrow belongs to someone else—perhaps another Arkansas native of "a place called Hope" (Mike Huckabee) or an already historical figure from Illinois with the audacity to give new life to some of the Clintons' old dreams.more at.......
http://www.newsweek.com/id/84540----------------------------------------------
A Candidacy's Prose and ConsBy E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, January 8, 2008; A19
CONCORD, N.H. -- Hillary Clinton may have unintentionally written the obituary for the Iowa and New Hampshire phase of her presidential campaign, and perhaps her candidacy, when she told voters on Sunday: "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose."
It is no accident that the two best preachers on the trail, Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee, broke through in Iowa -- even if Huckabee's prospects here and in the long run are dimmer than Obama's. And it has to be painful for Bill and Hillary Clinton, who saw themselves 16 years ago as the heirs to John and Robert Kennedy, to watch Obama march off as the champion of a vast band of young and practical idealists.The Clinton campaign is rooted in the idea that "Experience Counts" -- ironically enough, Richard Nixon's slogan against John Kennedy in 1960. But it is Obama who may have precisely the right experience for the mood of the moment. As a community organizer early in his professional life, Obama understood his task as catalyzing citizens into building movements for change. Obama's speeches are about citizen action, assembling coalitions, forcing change through popular demand."I'm betting on you," Obama told a rapturous audience in Derry on Sunday afternoon. "I don't believe change comes from the top down. It comes from the bottom up." Change will come "if you believe," Obama declares.
more at.....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/07/AR2008010702263.html?hpid=opinionsbox1
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