Anger At The Coronation
Toby Harndon at the Telegraph looks at the media's coronation of Hillary! Clinton as the inevitable winner of the Democratic nomination and finds plenty of people who are less than happy about it.
This has been the week of Hillary the Inevitable. She has broken the political equivalent of the sound barrier by surging past the 50 per cent mark in a national poll. Her fundraising is now outstripping that of Barack Obama, the Young Pretender. Rival political operatives are awestruck by the efficiency of her campaign.
But are the Democrats already experiencing buyer's remorse? "I've contributed to her in the past, I think she'd be a million times better than Bush but I don't like this coronation," one major party donor told me with a grimace at an Embassy Row function. "Maybe it's the dynasty thing. Maybe it's the control factor. Maybe it's just that she doesn't feel like change to me."
The American commentariat has simultaneously crowned the former First Lady and begun pelting her with rotten fruit. At a private gathering of pundits and pollsters recently, all nine declared in a straw poll that Mrs Clinton would win not only the Democratic nomination but the White House as well.
Then columnists from The New York Times, that most reliable bastion of the liberal establishment, formed the vanguard of an assault against her. "Without nepotism, Hillary would be running for the president of Vassar [an elite college founded for women]," sniffed Maureen Dowd.
Her colleague Gail Collins wrote of Mrs Clinton's talent for knowing "how to string together the maximum number of weasel words in one sentence".
Peggy Noonan slammed the dynasty system yesterday that would see a Clinton Succeed a Bush yet again. There is a bit of a backlash building against Clinton's early coronation - and that is a good thing. The system already favors the candidate with the most money. Early coronations before a single vote is cast are actually meaningless. Gore was supposed to be pretty much a shoo-in as was Kerry. The press gets these things wrong more often than they get it right. Harndon closes with a warning:
It may seem to be all over bar the voting. But the campaign still has months to run and elections have a nasty habit of upsetting both conventional wisdom and the best-laid plans.
And that is really the beauty of the system, isn't it?
By Mwalimu Daudi, Saturday, 6 October , 2007 @ 9:55 am
Early coronations before a single vote is cast are actually meaningless.
I agree. If there is one good thing about the floundering Bush presidency - his successes in the Iraq War and judicial appointments are offset by absolute and utter failure to defend thsse policies - it is that public distaste for dynastic preesidencies may be growing again.