With regards to the Hillary Clinton factor in '08 presidential politics (see my Feb. 23 post), it appears that there are four camps:
Those who like Hillary and think she can win.
Those who like Hillary but think she can't win.
Those who dislike Hillary and think she can't win.
Those who dislike Hillary but think she will win.
One noteworthy member of the latter camp is Dick Morris, the one-time Bill Clinton pollster who was forced to quit in the middle of the '96 campaign after being exposed as a prostitute's john. Morris used to be in the I-like-Hillary camp (see page 39 of his '97 memoir: "The more often people heard Hillary speaking out for her beliefs, the better they would like her...she is a sound, practical thinker"), but has since moved to the I-dislike camp in more recent books and in the column he writes for a Capitol Hill weekly. He can be quite obsessive about Hillary, calling her a faux moderate and riffing about her sexuality. No doubt his banishment from the Clinton inner circle had absolutely nothing to do with his conversion.
In any case, today he does offer an intriguing argument about why he thinks she'll win in '08 (a scenario which he nevertheless views as a threat to the republic), and, more significantly, his belief clashes with the predictions offered by President Bush and Karl Rove in "Strategery," the latest pro-Bush book hot off the conservative presses.
About Me
- Dick Polman
- Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. This online column is cited by The Washington Post as one of the top five mainstream political blogs in the country, and is touted by former "Hardball" TV producer Howard Mortman as "the immediately must-read political blog." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns. In his 22 years at the Inquirer, he has also been a foreign correspondent based in London; a baseball writer covering the Philadelphia Phillies; a general-assignment writer in the feature section; and a longtime Sunday magazine contributor. In the early '80s, he wrote three metro columns a week for the Hartford Courant. A graduate of George Washington University, today Dick is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence."