The Campaign to Date

It's going to be close tomorrow and Hillary will earn every delegate she gets. She has to as nothing is being given to her, not even the benefit of a doubt.

Let me reiterate what I said way back in September: There is only one person running for the Presidency in the primaries in either party, and that person is Hillary Clinton. As she showed in her Town Hall webcast tonight, she is on top of every issue facing the nation, from the bad economy to Iraq to rejuvenating our rural areas to green energy to immigration. There is nothing she doesn't have a comprehensive and well-considered view about. You may not like her view, but it is there and ready for discussion.

Every other candidate and every media outlet is against Hillary. Every other campaign has been built to defeat her, every blogospheric screamer proudly proclaims how he isn't going to be railroaded into voting for that bitch, and the entire campaign has turned into a mad trashing of all things Clinton. This is, if anything, worse than during the impeachment. It is not a mistake that HRC's entry into the presidential contest has brought every slime bag out from under his rock.

As I pointed out in my last post, there are divisions in our national soul that require us to stand up and fight for what is right. Contrary to the bluster and the bravado of places like TPM or Daily Kos, the last thing the blogosphere (or the nicely comfortable with the status quo party hacks) want is a real, in the trenches, partisan battle. They want nice clean wins, like the Social Security "save" in 2005, where Democrats were shamed into refusing to play Bush's game. Sorry, that was barely preserving the status quo, not gaining any new ground. Unless the game is "Bash the Clintons," and then they are all for it. Why? Because if Hillary is in office, there will be no way to avoid the show down. There will be no compromises because the right will never compromise with a Clinton. Ever. There is also no other way to defeat the movement conservatives.

One of the key appeals of The Golden One, and one of the chief impediments to HRC, is the leftist fantasy that some how we can win back the nation from the grips of the Movement Conservatives without actually having to fight for it, that we can just "Wow, cool!" our way into power. The left needs to get over its distaste for the weilding of political power. We need an FDR, not an Adalai Stevenson. Reading the comments just about anywhere on line, over and over we see the same themes - Hillary is divisive and will rouse anger from the right, while Obama will unify us and deflect or deflate those awful battles.

People like Josh Marshall (who complained about the negative campaign being run against Joe Lieberman until it was obvious that Lieberman was losing, then quickly switched to Lamont, if you all remember), are busy trashing Clinton day in and day out, promoting a candidate who sounds like a weak-version of Bill Clinton from the early 90s, has promised to call Social Security into question, vows to end the bi-partisan bickering in Washington DC by reaching out to the Republicans, and is now running Harry & Louise style ads against universal health care.

You begin to understand why Thelma & Louise went a bit crazy.

You begin to wonder how Hillary holds it together under a kind of barrage that no ordinary human being could withstand.

It comes down to the simple fact that she is running for President for all the right reasons. She knows how government can make life dramatically better for the majority of Americans and she is determined to see it done. It's not so much about making history, which would be all about the winner.

It's about making a future, which is all about us.

Hillary Clinton stands for the liberal democratic proposition that government can and must be used for the betterment of the ordinary citizen. Her vow to enact true universal health care is how the New Deal of this century will be cemented.

That is the reason I am voting for Hillary tomorrow, and in November.

Anglachel