Hillary Clinton Ambitious Campaign

It's early. The general election is 20 months away. The primaries are a little more than 10 months away. I appreciate how hard Hillary Clinton is working for the nomination but she seems to making every effort to win the nomination by summer of this year which would be a record of sorts.

At least she is beginning to make Bill Clinton part of her campaign instead of oddly avoiding the issue. Here's one story from The Hotline:

The Hillary Clinton camp is rolling out the big names of the Clinton Administration in its “grassroots” effort to raise $1M in a week.

The “One Week One Million” campaign launched last week with high profile e-mail (and accompanying picture that still has us scratching our heads) from “Bill Clinton.”

(As of 9 am, they had raised $619,896.)

And here's another article from the Earth Times:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco, said that her husband may have a role as a U.S. diplomat if she becomes president.

She said that former President Bill Clinton is "the most popular person in the world right now,'' the San Francisco Chronicle reported, and promised to keep up with the tradition of using former presidents as roving diplomats.

Bill Clinton would make a very fine diplomat—there's no question of it—but sooner or later we need to talk more openly about the political relationship between Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton—particulary in relation to Iraq and Hillary's vote to support Bush's war. The clearest path is straightforward. Hillary needs to clear the air. And Bill Clinton can help by helping us to understand the role of his administration in our dealings with Iraq, the influence that both Republican and Democratic neoconservatives had on our approach to Iraq in the 1990s, and his personal role in facilitating the relationship between Tony Blair and George W. Bush, if indeed that is what happened. We knew in 2002 and we know even more certainly now that Bill Clinton's policy of containment was the right approach to Iraq but he still had a role that needs to be explained and understood.

Last week, Paul Krugman of The New York Times had a few thoughts on Hillary Clinton (via Truthout):

The experience of Bush-style governance, together with revulsion at the way Karl Rove turned refusal to admit error into a political principle, is the main reason those now-famous three words from Mr. Edwards - "I was wrong" - matter so much to the Democratic base.

The base is remarkably forgiving toward Democrats who supported the war. But the base and, I believe, the country want someone in the White House who doesn't sound like another George Bush. That is, they want someone who doesn't suffer from an infallibility complex, who can admit mistakes and learn from them.

And there's another reason the admission by Mr. Edwards that he was wrong is important. If we want to avoid future quagmires, we need a president who is willing to fight the inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom on foreign policy, which still - in spite of all that has happened - equates hawkishness with seriousness about national security, and treats those who got Iraq right as somehow unsound. By admitting his own error, Mr. Edwards makes it more credible that he would listen to a wider range of views.

In truth, it's the second issue, not the first, that worries me about Mrs. Clinton. Although she's smart and sensible, she's very much the candidate of the Beltway establishment - an establishment that has yet to come to terms with its own failure of nerve and judgment over Iraq.

The problem with the Beltway establishment is that it's so cocksure it has the answers that it's been falling on its face for some years now, though most of the falling has been done by those connected to Bush and his fellow Republicans. One cannot ignore, however, those giving Bush and his crew a free pass for so long. Does Hillary Clinton now oppose Bush because of the incompetence of his administration, which of course is now evident to all, or does she understand how fundamentally flawed Bush's foreign policy vision was from the beginning? If all she is saying is that she would be more competent than Bush, that suggests that she has a poor understanding of what it will take to repair our foreign policy. We need a strong defense and a vigorous State Department with all the tools it can use—and I, for one, would welcome Bill Clinton as a roving ambassador—but what we do not need is a Democratic version of neoconservativism. Hillary Clinton's recent trip to Afghanistan is a good sign that she understands the importance of finishing the war there. Nevertheless, Senator Clinton needs to clear up some of these issues instead of simply steamrolling her way to the nomination.