Hillary Clinton Very Busy These Days

In some polls, Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. She's also very busy these days. She recently met with donors in New York who may be instrumental in a presidential bid. Here's a story by Dan Gearino of the Quad-City Times about a breakfast she had with Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa from:

U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, had a private breakfast Wednesday with potential presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, but Harkin said today that he remains firmly committed to his home-state candidate, Gov. Tom Vilsack.
“It was a private conversation and I was asked to keep it such and I will honor that,” he said in a conference call with reporters this morning.

Harkin said all of the possible presidential candidates are aware that he supports Vilsack, who officially entered the presidential race last week.

Thomas Beaumont of the Des Moine Register says Senator Clinton has also been talking with other Iowans:

Sen. Hillary Clinton began making calls Monday to Iowa Democrats about the state's political landscape with an eye toward its 2008 presidential nominating caucuses, aides to Clinton said.

The moves come as the New York senator has accelerated the steps she has taken since her November re-election toward making a decision about whether to run for president.

"She's begun the process of making some calls into Iowa," Lorraine Voles, Clinton's communication director, said Monday in a telephone interview with The Des Moines Register.

The New York Senator is also finding time to introduce new bills; here's the story from the blog, The Blue State:

In an effort to bolster her national security credentials for her almost certain run at the presidency in 2008, Hillary Rodham-Clinton is unveiling a bill that would create a senior White House adviser on nuclear terrorism. Clinton recently wrote a letter to new Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin and new Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden, informing them that the bill has been submitted for January's Congress. The bill's House sponsor was Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-CA).

I hope they don't actually call the new position the nuclear terrorism adviser since the term "terrorism" is getting politically overused. But a senior official who keeps track of the world's nuclear weapons and materials and the governments and groups that are interested in acquiring such weapons and possibly using them is growing more necessary.

Finally, via the Los Angeles Times, Arianna Huffington has a critical piece on Hillary Clinton:

There are politicians with great instincts as leaders — those who recognize not just the crises directly in front of them but those around the corner as well. (And these leadership instincts come from the gut, not from a multitude of consultants, strategists and pollsters.) And then there are politicians with great instincts as followers — those who are the first to stick their fingers in the air and notice even the slightest shift in the wind of popular opinion.

Clinton is in the latter category: She is the quintessential political weather vane.

On Iraq, she remains a captive of her and her consultants' belief that the country isn't ready for a female commander in chief who isn't a hawk. Unfortunately, she's misreading the zeitgeist. Democrats are fed up with fence-straddling and triangulation.

Since Bush brags about his gut instincts, I wish Arianna had qualifed her comments. Those with first-rate 'gut instincts' take the trouble to fully inform themselves in the first place and they are willing to think hard about whether their 'gut instinct' is right and they will test that instinct in different ways and then, finally, they can manage on their own to articulate rationally their position without resorting to speech writers or inane repetitions. They can do all this fairly quickly in weeks or even days and understand what it is they're trying to accomplish; they don't take three years to find out they might be wrong; they also don't sit on their hands hoping they're right.

As for Hillary Clinton misreading the zeitgeist, it appears that way now. But let's see how she develops over the next few months. I'm also very curious how she will handle herself in her first debate. The big thing Clinton has to watch out for is the impression that she's always making calculating moves or, as Arianna says, engaging in 'triangulation.'

Although a capable campaigner and saleman, George W. Bush clearly has not read the zeitgeist very well and is guilty of fighting the conservative politics of twenty to fifty years ago. It's often been said that the neoconservative intellectuals seemed poorly informed about most of the 1990s since they were in a sense obsessed with and stuck on the fall of the Soviet Union and the Gulf War.

Let's think in terms of time for a moment to drive home the point. The year 1930 was very different than the world 1946 revealed to us. The slow year of 1952 was very different than the major events and times of 1968. Senator Clinton needs to show that she can make the leap from the successful politics of sixteen years ago in 1992 to the successful politics of 2008; there are plenty of signs that we have entered a different era. It's early, but so far Hillary Clinton has shown signs that she doesn't fully understand the problems that are quickly approaching. I hope she catches up.