I see nothing original, bold or interesting in her policies or statements, just what to her and her advisors (whom she appears to not be able to choose her wardrobe without) seem like the safest and most tried and true things to say. Stylistically, she might superficially come across as progressive in terms of the anger and stridency of her tone, but substantively, she obsessively toes the CW line and will not--and likely cannot, characterologically--step out of line and take a chance on something truly progressive and game-changing.

And this is a perfect example of how she will spew the most concern-trollish DLCesque nonsense about how despte all that's happened, the country will still naturally gravitate to the GOP if something happens, and that she--for reasons I cannot grasp--is best equipped to handle this. Why, because she's closest to them politically? She is the very epitome of the inside the beltway political conservatism that dominates the Democratic party and resulted in the Iraq war, Patriot Act, MCA, supplemental and FISA capitulations. I.e. don't fight them openly, or you lose. Fight them at the margins, rhetorically, not substantively, and somehow this will lead to success. Yeah, right. That's work.

From the BBC:

US Democratic Senator John Kerry says a video message from Osama Bin Laden sealed his defeat in a presidential race dominated by the 9/11 attacks.

He said the impact of Bin Laden's message was evident by the dent in his ratings that followed its appearance.

"We were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4222647.stm

Michael Dukakis has seen this script before: a Republican administration besieged by scandal and running out the clock on its second term, while wide-eyed Democrats confidently lick their chops, knowing there's no way in hell voters will reward the G.O.P. with four more years in the White House.

It was around this very moment 20 years ago, the summer when Oliver North told Congress he was "authorized to do everything that I did" and Reagan fatigue took hold, that Mr. Dukakis, then the 53-year-old governor of Massachusetts, emerged at the head of a crowded Democratic presidential pack. By the time he was formally nominated in Atlanta the following July, he'd opened a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush.
* * *
So you can understand why the numerous harbingers of a triumphant 2008 for Democrats--George W. Bush's Nixonian approval ratings, polls that show voters favoring a Democratic White House candidate by double-digit margins, the electorate's historical aversion to three-term rule by one party--haven't prompted Mr. Dukakis to begin planning his trip to the 2009 inaugural celebration.

"We're not going to outspend the other guys," he said during an interview in his modest office in the political science department at Northeastern University, where he was the first to arrive (at 7:30 a.m.) on a recent midsummer morning. "We're probably not going to outstrategize them. And some crazy guy will blow up a building with three weeks to go, you know, and then we'll be back in Bush-land again."

Dukakis' prescription to immunize against this is quite common-sensical:  block by block, precinct by precinct organizing, now, to protect against the Rethugs' stunts when, not if, they pull them.

"We have to organize every damn precinct in the United States of America--all 185,000," Mr. Dukakis said. "I'm serious. I'm deadly serious. I didn't do it after the primary [in 1988]. Don't ask me why, because that's the way I got myself elected from the time I was running for town meeting in Brookline to the time I ran for governor."

And when he talks about organizing, he doesn't mean the legions of eager college students--think the orange-hat-clad "Perfect Storm" that Howard Dean sought to rain down on Iowa in 2004--who are shipped off to key states for crunch-time grunt work. He also doesn't mean limiting the outreach to "likely" Democratic voters, because--especially after seven years of George W. Bush--"there are huge numbers of disaffected Republicans out there. Who says they won't vote for us?"

"I'm talking about every precinct," he said, "with a precinct captain and six block-captains that make personal contact with every single voting household. And I mean starting a year in advance. I'm not talking about parachuting in with two weeks to go. That's baloney. And these people are people who've got to be from the precinct, of the precinct, look like the precinct and talk like the precinct."
The way he tells it, this was the missing ingredient in his 1988 effort--a powerful and utterly economical tool that, if properly deployed, could have blunted the Bush campaign's character-assassination-by-paid-media, and one that could spare Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama his ultimate fate.

True to his technocratic roots, Mr. Dukakis has the idea of replicating, on every street, avenue, and rural route in the country, the kind of personal relationships that once powered big-city political machines--with precinct captains calling on their neighbors every few weeks, asking them about their concerns, talking up their candidate and following up on any questions they might have. Mr. Dukakis' vision is rooted in good government--making sure, for instance, that a neighbor's concerns about school vouchers are satisfactorily addressed.

That kind of personalized operation early on, Mr. Dukakis believes, can keep voters from believing the worst when the Willie Horton and Swift Boat campaigns begin.

"There's a chemistry there, which is hard to describe unless you've done it," he said. "Otherwise, it permits your opponent to paint you as something you aren't. It happened to me. It happened to Kerry. They tried to do it to Clinton. They'll try to do it to anybody."

Here's how Mr. Dukakis broke down the struggle that Mr. Kerry--Mr. Dukakis' lieutenant governor from 1983 to 1985--faced three years ago.

"You never had a sense that people felt personally connected to the guy, right? Had he had that kind of operation going nationally, there would have been a much stronger feeling of personal connection. Why? Because average folks in the neighborhood are out pushing him."

Mr. Dukakis says he pleaded with Mr. Kerry to build a meaningful precinct-based organization in 2004, but couldn't break through. Now he's working informally with the Democratic National Committee, where Chairman Howard Dean--he of the 50-state strategy--is much more receptive to the concept. But so far, Mr. Dukakis said, none of the 2008 Democrats seem serious about his brand of organizing.

"The guy who ought to be doing it, above any of them, is Obama, because he's probably got 300,000 contributors," he notes. "Every one of those people, as soon as the contribution comes in: `Thank you and will you be a precinct captain?' Or, `Thank you, this guy is your precinct captain--will you be one of his block captains?'"

Frankly, I'm not seeing any of this sort of organizing going on - and I live in a bluer-than-blue neighborhood in a bluer-than-blue county.  And, when Kerry came up for election in '04, I got lots of robo-calls (I lost count) from all sorts of dignitaries.  And chirpy, pretty college-age girls came around and around - three times - to ask whether I'd voted for Kerry.

No feedback to direct them to places not yet covered.  No feedback from them to tell HQ who's already voted.

People from outside the neighborhood - clueless about the neighborhood (they didn't know where the polling place was, even though when I spoke to them it was 50 yards behind my left shoulder and in their line of sight), getting lost and not getting any help.  And then having been sent out to get my vote.

Please.  

All I'm seeing from the Democratic party is a mutual BJ society going on about how great they are, how much they're fundraising, and how the polls tell them the Rethugs are going down in November, over a year from now.  And in the meantime, they have reverted to all the bad old ways of corporatist behavior.  And in so doing they are trashing their base (i.e., us) at every turn, while spreading their cheeks for Bushie and Deadeye once and again.

And, I predicted (elsewhere) during the summer of 2004 that Osama would make an appearance within the last week of the campaign so as to facilitate Bushie winning.  Guess what - he did.

The only poll which counts is that Tuesday in November, 2008.  Everything should be directed at making certain the maximum number of committed Democratic voters turns out for that vote.  While that does not exclude outreach to centrist voters, the best way to ensure Democrats vote, is for candidates to be Democrats, and to stand up for Democratic ideals.  The movable centrists will move toward candidates with spines.

This comment is the very definition of concern trollism: don't fight or you will lose.

I agree that it should be untrue - that another terrorist attack should make the Republicans less palatable to the American public.  I don't think we can or should assume that would happen.  I can envision the public rallying around Guliani, for example, in the wake of another attack.

One way to ensure that doesn't happen is to talk about it now.  I'm not crazy about how Clinton raised the point, but I do think the more Dems talk about it, the less likely it is to happen.  If the public already has it in its mind that 1) Republicans will seek to rally voters around a terrorist attack (and you can bet they'll get MSM help), and 2) that would be a stupid thing to do because the Republicans aren't the strong ones on counter-terrorism, etc., and have actually made it worse, then I think the public (and perhaps more importantly the MSM) will be somewhat innoculated from thinking along this line.  

I understand why other Dems are looking for a Clinton gaffe, but I think it would be a mistake to take a statement that essentially reflects a widely held view and act like it's the dumbest thing in the world for any candidate to acknowledge.  Yes, it makes no sense for Americans to reward Republicans if there were another terrorist attack but I think we've already shown that people aren't all that rational after such attack.  Moroever, it's important to discuss this widely held MSM view because it's those idiots who are going to be the ones covering the next terror attack and commenting on its political ramifications non-stop.  

I think Clinton's real gaffe in this area was in saying in one of the early debates that we're safer now than we were.  That weakens Dem. arguments about why the public shouldn't rally around the Republicans after another terrorist attack.  I was happy to see her try to back away from that by focusing on the preparation of first responders, but I still think it was a mistake.

The current comment is only a mistake if folks don't follow up on it by forcing a discussion about why the Republicans are still portrayed by much of the media as the stronger party on counter-terrorism and why this is wrong.  In other words, what Dems. need to do is not focus on this comment as a gaffe but demonstrate why Clinton's earlier comment about being safer was wrong.

I cannot stop shaking my head over this one.

let's not stick our heads in the sand and pretend that she's actually wrong. She's not, and we'd better be prepared to deal with it.

If this should happen, you can be damn sure that the right wing media spin machine will be blaming the Democrats before the blood is cold on the pavement.  And many ignorant Americans will fall for it.

As I've said before, the Bush White House and the Republican war agenda is dependent upon Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist movement for their very survival.  It is a symbiotic relationship, one cannot prosper and grow without the other.  Look for a major terrorist attack next year sometime, perhaps around late spring.  Osama bin Laden desperately needs Republicans in the White House, and he will do his part in assisting the Republicans in their efforts to regain the House and Senate as well.

Clinton's foreign-policy approach is ``very conventional,'' Brzezinski said. ``I don't think the country needs to go back to what we had eight years ago.''

``There is a need for a fundamental rethinking of how we conduct world affairs,'' he added. ``And Obama seems to me to have both the guts and the intelligence to address that issue and to change the nature of America's relationship with the world.''

The continual screams to bring the troops home, to "talk" with the terrorists, etc., etc. have a price if we have an attack.