Clinton

Mark Schmitt contemplates Hillary Clinton's campaign. It's kind of inside baseball stuff, for the hardcore, but very interesting if you're into that sort of thing.

I have a feeling that Mark Penn, Senator Clinton's pollster and apparently her de facto campaign manager, is going to start getting some close, and long overdue, scrutiny.

He says this because of an article by Anne Kornblut, pulling from it stuff like this:

She establishes that Penn is the driving force behind Clinton's refusal to say more than “if I knew then what I know now” on Iraq, and further that he holds that view in part because he comes from what she calls “the national security wing” of the Democratic Party, and in part because he is an actual not-so-liberal hawk, having polled for Menachem Begin in Israel and Joe Lieberman—and breaking with Lieberman now only because, “when the war went south, Lieberman went north.” (The only problem with the Iraq war is that it didn't go well.)

I'm not sure if that means that I should be more or less enthusiastic about Senator Clinton's candidacy.

Because on the one hand, it's exactly the kind of manipulative “centrist” DLC crap that made me oppose Bill Clinton in the primaries in '92, was the worst part of his administration, and the thing that I think is most wrong with the Dems now.

But on the other hand, Bill won the primaries, won the election, and by my lights was as good a President as I expect to see in my lifetime. So maybe my judgement on this point isn't so hot.