Excellent editorial in this morning's Los Angeles Times. Columnist Rosa Brooks starts out with a comparison of Hillary's failed 2008 presidential campaign to the 1992 presidential race, in which incumbent George H. W. Bush got knocked off by a political unknown, Bill Clinton:
"It's the economy, stupid," said James Carville, summing up Bill Clinton's 1992 win over George H.W. Bush. Bush started out with incumbent status and an impressive resume, but he never managed to wrap his mind around the fact of the recession. In the end, he lost to Clinton -- the candidate from nowhere.Ms. Brooks proceeds from there, not only attributing Senator Clinton's 2008 campaign loss to her basic failure to grasp a fundamental issue in the 2008 campaign, i.e., Clinton's 2002 vote for the Iraq War, but also to "resemblances between [her] campaign style and [current president George W.] Bush's Iraq strategy," which Columnist Brooks characterise as "eerie and striking."
Sixteen years later, it's Clinton's wife who's found herself in the elder Bush's position. Hillary Rodham Clinton began the Democratic primary with a famous name, thousands of Democrats who owed their careers to her husband, an enviable war chest and scores of superdelegates in her pocket before the race even began.
All the same, she lost. To a guy few had heard of four years ago. A black guy with the unpropitious name of Barack Hussein Obama, who had no money, no superdelegates and no political machine. But this week, he won, fair and square.
How did Clinton go from inevitable to irrelevant in six months? If Carville were still at the top of his game, he'd be telling Clinton: It's Iraq, stupid. In more ways than one.
A fascinating op-ed piece all-in-all, and definitely worth a read, we think, now that the Democratic Party presidential nomination process is complete, and American journalistic commentators and pundits launch the inevitable presidential nomination post mortem.
Reader comments are invited, of course.
