Some Almost Post Primary Observations

I write this as someone who really admires Hillary Clinton and believes that she would have made a very fine President. It is looking like she is not going to be the nominee for the Democrats----but one never knows what will happen between now and November. As a result, I'm writing this from the perspective that it's hitting the two minute warning, she does not have the ball, does not have any time outs, and is behind by two scores. Lest someone say I'm premature, that's my starting point.

I think that she ran into some things that she might have not been expecting.

First, in an ironic twist of fate, George W. Bush helped pull her down. Bush has an incredibly low approval rating and the nation's perspective is that we are heading in the wrong direction----rapidly. It is always impossible to say at the time, but I deeply suspect that this administration will rank very low on effective Presidencies.

What happened to her was that there is a strong sense of anti-incumbency and anti-Bush. She might not be the incumbent President, but she was, as First Lady, there before, and people just want to clean the house out, lock, stock, and barrel. Oddly enough, the dislike of the current President has worn off on her.

Secondly there is the war. Tapes of speeches that Hillary Clinton made previous to the invasion of Iraq demonstrated that she had plenty to drink at the Bush Kool-Aid stand. Many of the words she used were his exact words. The fact that she pronounced them correctly and used them in proper grammatical order made her a bit different from Bush, but not much. He long, convoluted explanations on this did not help her. A simply "I believed him, I voted for the war, and I believed his lies," would have been enough. They weren't.

Thirdly, the gas tax proposal at the last minute looked like a cheap political stunt and it looked so cheaply political that people didn't seem to buy into it very much.

Fourthly, Hillary gets 'cute' with her answers some times. When asked, some time back, if Obama was Muslim, her answer was, "From what I have heard, I don't believe that he might be." It was something along that line when 'no' would have been a more direct answer. You can't milk political advantage out of EVERY question.

Lastly, Obama ran a better campaign. She did not foresee the importance of the caucuses, she did not have an effective fund-raising mechanism, she ignored smaller states, and she had no Post-Super-Tuesday strategy. Hillary's negativity tended towards personal, and Obama's negativity tended towards policy. John Yarmuth beat Ann Northup the same way.

This was an amazing and historic primary process. We'll see how that translates in November.