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Sunday, August 5, 2007
Lack of making some commitments could cost Hillary Clinton
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has gotten a lot of political mileage lately by not making commitments - to meet unconditionally with rogue leaders or to take nuclear weapons “off the table” in countering terrorists, for example.
But her refusal to make some commitments to the Internet activists attending the annual YearlyKos convention in Chicago this week may have cost her some political points with one of the most influential factions of the party.
And it isn’t just her refusal to foresake campaign contributions from Washington lobbyists, the subject of a dust-up with rivals John Edwards and Barack Obama at the YearlyKos candidates forum Saturday.
Clinton also refused to commit to campaigning in all 50 states if she is the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee. She was the only candidate at the forum who refused to do so.
“I don’t know whether I will or I won’t,” she said, when asked to commit to campaign in all 50 states. She hedged her comments a bit, however, with this statement: “But I know that I’ll have a strategy that is a 50-state strategy.”
She further clouded the issue by noting that she had campaigned all across the state of New York in her Senate campaigns intead of just concentrating her efforts on the bonanza of Democratic votes in New York City.
During those campaigns, she said, she told rural New Yorkers: “I don’t know if you’re going to vote for me but I want to be your senator.” She said she would tell voters in conservative “red” states pretty much the same thing.
“I’m going to tell people in all these places, in all these red states that I’ll travel to … that I will be the president for everybody,” Clinton said.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean is one of the most popular figures with the netroots activists, and one of his most popular proposals has been to commit the party to compete for votes in all 50 states instead of concentrating on the 17 to 20 states with strong Democratic traditions or swing voters.
One of the political raps against Clinton is that she would be too unpopular in the red states of the South and interior West for a 50-state strategy to work for the Democrats.
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