Patrick Healy's take on Hillary's continuing Iraq triangulation problem

After reading Patrick Healy's excellent analysis in Sunday's New York Times of the eternal internal dilemma of the Hillary 2008 campaign -the verbal expression of resolve vs. the practical virtue of pragmatism- I'm more convinced than ever of certain things, given my own perspective as someone who was not only continually talking my friends' ear off about the virtues and possibilities of a Bill Clinton presidency since at least 1990, but who contacted the Virginia Democratic Party HQ in Richmond in the summer of '91 about the requirements for running as a Clinton delegate to the DNC the following year in New York.

(As some of you may know, and not incidentally, I have a very dear friend of mine who also hails from Hope, Arkansas, someone whose mother -if I recall this correctly- literally grew-up across the street from Clinton, before he and his mother left for Hot Springs, when his mother left to study nursing.)

To South Beach Hoosier, it's deliciously irony that some of Hillary's longtime institutional supporters within the Democratic Party, who've been among the biggest critics of President Bush for what I see as his steadfastness, but which they maintain is his stubborness and unwillingness to admit what they perceive to be a mistake, now find themselves forced to publicly swallow their tongues and ignore their presence in an internal contradiction, as Hillary triangulates her response to anti-war critics who demand that she, too, admit a large dose of culpability for her past record regarding Iraq.

You know how much it must gall them, personally, but what can they do? If they criticize her publicly, they're off the band wagon, and the Clintons never, never allow anyone who jumps off the band wagon, to board again. Ever.

Bob Shrum, Democratic political operative and longtime MSNBC Hardball guest, who is referenced here merely "a senior adviser to Mr. Kerry in 2004," much to his own consternation and the eternal disgust of many Democrats in DC, including me when I was living there, has NEVER been part of a successful Democratic presidential campaign. Ever.

At some point, the national media might want to acknowledge that it's not a chicken or egg question, anymore with Shrum -it's him: His political instincts are almost always wrong.

And as for Shrum never learning from his past mistakes, ask Susan Estrich how difficult it was to get the Kerry campaign folks in DC to keep her in the loop while she was a FOX News consultant, constantly on FOX News to give her take on the Kerry p.o.v./spin-of-the-day.

Desperate to be on top of things and get Kerry's official p.o.v. included in one of her broadcasts so that she didn't mis-charachetrize a comment, she later claimed in a book appearance on
C-SPAN's Book TV that getting info from the Kerry folks was -if I remember my metaphor correctly- akin to pulling teeth!!!
And that's how they treat their friends!

Yet the Times, like most other national media organizations, continues to give Bob Shrum a degree of deference and importance that doesn't accord with his actual track record.

This tendency to log-roll longtime -and future- sources in such an obvious and self-serving way is perhaps the biggest difference between contemporary sports and political coverage in the country.

The sports sections of most major newspapers aren't constantly full of quotes from people who never actually win.
You know, losers.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/18/us/politics/18clinton.html

New York Times
February 18, 2007
Clinton Gives War Critics New Answer on ’02 Vote
By Patrick Healy