Still pushing Hillary in 2016 -- and I'm not alone

By Richard K. Barry

In my own small way, I have been pushing the idea of Hillary Clinton running for president in 2016. I think she'd be great, and apparently I have company.

What does the list of encouragers look like, in no particular order?

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently told Charlie Rose on PBS that, "Yes, that would be so exciting."

New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand has said that she would be "one of the first" to ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2016, and, if you can believe it, Donald Trump has even said positive things about the possibility. Go figure.

Most intriguing, though, is the comment by Bill Clinton that he would be "happy" if Hillary sought the presidency, though he is sticking to the script that he doesn't think she will. As he told Good Morning America:

I believe that she's being absolutely honest with you when she says she doesn't think she'll go back into politics. But if she comes home and we do this foundation stuff for the rest of our lives, I'll be happy; if she changes her mind and decides to run, I'll be happy.

I think that comment speaks volumes. It says to me that Bill knows his wife and knows that when the time comes she will be very tempted to get back into politics.

For her part, Hillary has been saying things like, "It's flattering, but, you know, I'm not planning to do that," adding that she has no "desire or intention" to run again for the White House.

Of course, even a casual observer would realize that these are non-denial denials. All they suggest is that someone else in her party currently has the job and is running for re-election and that it would be highly inappropriate for her to create unwanted background noise. We get that. 

I'm not saying she will do it. I don't think she would risk a high-stakes run in which there were difficult odds against success. But if things align in any reasonable fashion, I don't see how she could say no. 

In my humble opinion, her kind of political talent comes around rarely, and it would be foolish for the Democratic Party not to encourage any aspirations she might have.


(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Republican idiot extraordinaire Allen West says liberals should "get the hell out"

By Michael J.W. Stickings

It's really not worth paying any attention to Allen West, the insane right-wing Republican Congressman from Florida who says stupid things (and bigoted things) pretty much everytime he opens his mouth.

But pay attention we do, if only because it's good to keep track of the crazy things Republicans say and do and because in his own way West speaks to the current degraded state of the conservative, er, mind -- a mind that has been purged of reason and civility.

Here, for example, is what West said yesterday at a dinner -- and of all things a Lincoln Day dinner, as if the GOP has anything at all in common with Mr. Lincoln -- in West Palm Beach:

We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table. Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America.

Of course, this is the usual sort of ridiculousness we hear from so many Republicans these days, even the supposedly sane (but not so much) Mitch Daniels. Seriously, in what world is any of this true? Unless you're completely delusional, perhaps as a result of spending too much time in the presence of Republican propaganda without an ounce of critical thinking, how can you possibly think that Obama and the Democrats are anti-free market? And how exactly do Democrats seek equality of achievement? By refusing to gut Social Security, pumping (not nearly enough) money into the economy when it's just about to go off the cliff, and bailing out Wall Street and the auto industry?

It's like some bat-shit-crazy bizarro world these people inhabit. And it is.

And, yes, Europe, that anti-capitalist, freedom-hating dystopia with... with... with all that social mobility and those hugely profitable companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Siemens and Novartis and Shell and Nokia and Airbus and those massive banks like HSBC and Santander, and those dynamic global cities like London and Paris and Berlin, not to mention that great quality of life.

Slavery!

This is the level of "discourse" we've come to expect not just from West but from Republicans generally. And, as the GOP descends further and further into madness, it's not going to get any better anytime soon.

Is Nancy Pelosi waiting to unleash the dirt on Newt?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

ABC News reports:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi now says she is not sitting on a trove of opposition research on former House Speaker-turned-GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

In an interview conducted Friday and published Monday, Pelosi hinted that once the time is right she has some juicy stories to tell about her former colleague.

"One of these days we'll have a conversation about Newt Gingrich," Pelosi, D-Calif., told Talking Points Memo. "I know a lot about him. I served on the investigative committee that investigated him. Four of us locked in a room in an undisclosed location for a year. A thousand pages of his stuff."

But this afternoon, Pelosi's spokesman, Drew Hammill, suggested that her comments have been misconstrued beyond the leader's intent.

"Leader Pelosi was clearly referring to the extensive amount of information that is in the public record, including the comprehensive committee report with which the public may not be fully aware," Hammill wrote in a statement.

Yeah, right.

Pelosi and others, not just Democrats but many anti-Newt Republicans as well, have a ton of dirt on Gingrich and will use is as needed over the coming weeks and months, depending on how he does. But, right now, the Democrats, at least, don't need to use it. Because they don't want to knock Newt off his perch as frontrunner and (gasp!) possible (probable?) nominee? No, they want him to win.

Win the GOP nomination, that is, because he'd be much less of a threat to beat Obama in the general election than Romney, who, for all his faults and unpopularity with the GOP base, is fairly appealing to moderates and independents given his reputation as a moderate technocrat who understands business and the economy (that this isn't what he actually is, or is no longer, could eventually turn moderates and independents against him, but at least for now he can ride the perception and avoid the reality).

By "one of these days," then, Pelosi either misspoke, revealing too much when she should have kept quiet, or meant "after Newt wins the nomination, if it comes to that." Or both. As TPM's Brian Beutler put it:

There's no better illustration of how ecstatic Democrats are about Newt Gingrich leading the GOP primary pack than Nancy Pelosi's strategic silence.

Though she wasn't so silent as to avoid providing that glimpse into the future:

Pressed for more detail she wouldn't go further.

"Not right here," Pelosi joked. "When the time's right."

Which is to say that if Gingrich somehow clinches the nomination, there's one hell of an oppo dump coming. 

Pardon me, and so many others, for salivating.

**********

Actually, though, I'm not sure the dirt would matter. The media would dig up the old Newt anyway, and the new Newt really isn't new at all. He's still an arrogant egomaniac who says (and believes) insane things, like how poor (i.e., black) children should be forced to work because all they're good for is criminality.

And if that weren't enough, he's been rather eccentric in his conservatism, promoting relatively humane views on undocumented immigration and even -- yes, even -- responsible views on energy and climate change, two absolute no-nos in today's GOP.

Hey, he even did an ad on climate change with... Nancy Pelosi. And this could be as damaging to him as any oppo research dirt.

How do you think the Republican base will react when this little nugget makes its way around the right-wing insanitarium? The dirt would turn off moderates and independents, to the extent he'd have any such support, but his heterodox positions, past and present, would surely turn off conservatives. He's managing to weather any such criticism now largely because he's seen as much preferable to Romney (and because most people still aren't paying attention), but his record speaks for itself.