‘There is no such thing as false hope’

January 7, 2008

After Saturday night’s Democratic debate, there was a fair amount of discussion about an exchange in which Hillary Clinton raised her voice and became quite animated while talking about her ability to be a force for change. The discussion was between those who thought Clinton helped herself by showing passion and those who thought Clinton hurt herself by possibly losing her cool.

I argued that both sides were missing the point — what she said was more noteworthy than the way she said it: “I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change. And we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.”

Regardless of tone or theatrics, warning against “false hopes,” I argued, is probably the opposite of the message candidates should be delivering, particularly to a group of voters looking to be inspired.

Today, Kevin Drum picks up on the same point, and notes that Clinton has been warning of “false hopes” for a while now.

[W]hat’s surprising isn’t just that the way she put it was horribly off-putting, but that it wasn’t just a momentary gaffe. Back in December, when Obama’s poll numbers first started turning up, she said the same thing: “Arguing that her campaign is in a ‘very strong position,’ Clinton hammered Obama for offering ‘false hopes’ rather than action. She predicted that voters will want, in her words, ‘a doer, not a talker.'”

This language backfired back then, so why would she deliberately resurrect it in front of a national audience? I thought she was doing fine up until that moment, but I’ll bet that “false hopes” line stuck in a lot of craws. After all, I’m pretty sympathetic toward her, and it stuck in mine.

And all of this immediately reminded me of the last time I heard about “false hopes” in a presidential campaign.

Except, in this case, it was fictional.

For those of you who can’t watch clips online, the video is from season six of the West Wing, when fictional Democrat Matt Santos kicked off his presidential campaign. He told his audience:

“I am here to tell you that hope is real. In a life of trials and a world of challenges, hope is real. In a country where families go without healthcare, where some go without food, some don’t even have a home to speak of, hope is real. In a time of global chaos and instability where our faiths collide, as often as our weapons, hope is real. Hope is what gives us to the courage to take on our greatest challenges, to move forward together.

We live in cynical times, I know that, but hope is not up for debate. There is such a thing as false science, there is such a thing as false promises, I am sure I will have my share of false starts in this campaign. But there is no such thing as false hope. There is only hope.”

“False hope” probably isn’t among the most effective talking points for the campaign trail right now.

False hopes, like with stem cell research? Which parties’ talking point is that…

  • I think the hope that if you just try to talk nice to Congressional Republican’ts you can make positive change for America is pretty demonstrably false.

    There are such things as false hopes, no matter what Jimmy Smits says.

  • May I remind everyone about the wave of hope we felt after the 2006 election – the one where we got the majority? Remember all that hopeful fervor, the speeches in the House and Senate?

    Maybe “false hopes” is not the right term – and maybe she just didn’t frame it the way she should have.

    I’m all for hope, but after the last year, less inclined to put all my eggs in that basket. It’s true that a Demcratic WH AND a Democratic majority in Congress will be reason to hope, but I think we need to live in the real world.

  • “Oh, you terrible girl! How could you do this to me?! I’m melting! Melting!” Glub…glub…”false!”…glub…glub…”hope!”…glub…gurgle….

    Will someone break out the gear and mop up that glob?

  • Some men see things as they are and say, “Why?” I dream of things that never were and say, “Why not?” – Robert F. Kennedy, borrowed from George Bernard Shaw.

    When I heard Hillary poo-poo “false hope” in Saturday’s debate, it made me really angry. She used to believe in “a place called Hope,” or at least Bill did back in 1992.

    Very disappointing.

  • I agree it is a failed strategy she’s adopted. She needed a good reponse or method to counter what Barack’s doing, but this isn’t it. If she’s going to use “false hopes” she should at least elaborate on it effectively so that she explains what she means and makes a telling point at the same time, meaning she should have sort of a stock thing that’s understandable and catchy to follow up saying “false hopes” that she just deviates from in the detail of the delivery from appearance to appearance only enough so it doesn’t get monotonous to political observers.

  • IMO it’s that kind of cynicism that makes a lot of Independents unable to get very excited about returning to the days of Clintonian triangulation, the first round of which resulted in massive sellouts like NAFTA and the Telecommunications act of 1996.

    I haven’t heard Obama say anything overly optimistic, at least nothing that stands out from all the other political speeches I’ve heard.

  • Lance, did you really just type that with a straight face?

    First of all, I’m an Edwards supporter, not an Obama supporter, so I’m not coming to this with an agenda.

    But to state that Obama’s argument is to “talk nice to Congressional Republican’ts ” is so simplistic it’s infantile.

    I’m not convinced by Obama’s candidacy yet, but he pretty clearly doesn’t have an agenda of “talking nice” to get things done. The idea is to unite Republican (and Independent) *voters*, not Republican politicians, to win a broad-based mandate that he can then use to make Republican *politicians* more afraid of him than of their historic donors.

    Again, I’m not convinced, and there’s plenty of bits to Obama’s rhetoric that bother me. But don’t make childish pseudo-arguments and pretend that they actually make a case.

  • …but I think we need to live in the real world.
    The one thing that Hillary has yet to understand is that this sort of rhetoric doesn’t win any voters. It’s the kind of talk that parents give to their children, and when you treat voters (and other candidates) like children, you are projecting the kind of leadership that a democracy DOESN’T need. The typical Republican is very good at lecturing to the rest of the electorate like they’re children. They bought themselves time by mixing fear into the equation – do this or you will die – but eventually they got called on it in the midterms. It is a losing formula that I’m surprised Hillary and her supporters would adopt. The American people are tired of being bullied around with their votes, and that the Clinton camp and their boosters would bring us more of the same just makes them more unelectable.

  • Have you seen anything in the Republican mindset that makes you think that there is a hope that they will be swayed by bipartisanship? It must be frustrating for Hillary to have the game change when she has invested so much in learning the game. People wanted a fighter and now they seem to want an “inspirer”. Obama is riding on a wave of hope that the Republicans want to work together. That, is a false hope, in my opinion.

  • In observing American politics, the truth seldom if ever wins votes. We love our snake oil.

    I think Hillary, as much as I despise her, was making a valid point. The day after the election our situation in the world, our environment won’t magically get better, regardless of who is elected. Now most of y’all who read this site are very aware of that, but the sweet little pro Obama young woman I spoke with in the grocery line really thinks he will solve everything in the first month. Ah, youth.

  • False Hope—as in “phony?” Now where have we heard that word bandied about recently?

    Inquiring minds want to know….

  • May I remind everyone about the wave of hope we felt after the 2006 election… -Anne

    It’s all semantics, but I’m more inclined to call that misplaced trust. As long as the people believe they can make changes through elections, there is no such thing as false hope. Hope is elastic…it’ll stretch into each coming year, but hopefully it won’t break, and instead snap back as we retake our country from the corporatists.

    We trusted Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein to do the right things. They haven’t. I hope they will have effective primary challengers when they are up for election again.

    I hope that everyone who believed Bush and was complicit in starting and unnecessary and wasteful war while allowing our true enemy to taunt us from the shadows finds their political career at an end soon.

    We can trust that certain people will see that our hopes and dreams come to fruition, but even if they let us down, we can still have those hopes and dreams. Their failures can’t take them away from us unless we let them.

    I think that blogs, like this one, with a gallery of regular readers is one of the best proofs of this concept. Despite all that has happened in this country, some of us haven’t given up on a better future.

  • A dear friend has for years signed her e-mails with the message, “Hope Springs Eternal,” and lately I’ve come back around to believing that it does. The place from whence it springs lies within us, and it flows as long as we allow it to.

    Hope is what enables many of us to get up in the morning. It’s what inspires us to do better and to aspire to ideals that we may never reach but still make progress toward.

    Maybe HRC’s self-proclaimed “experience” has left her cynical. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the rest of us should surrender our hope, as wishful or idealistic as it may be. Without it, we’re screwed — hell, we might as well not vote at all as vote for her.

  • Steve T. wrote: “The idea is to unite Republican (and Independent) *voters*, not Republican politicians, to win a broad-based mandate that he can then use to make Republican *politicians* more afraid of him than of their historic donors.”

    Is that the idea?

    To achieve what mandate? So far, I haven’t heard anything out of Obama that is more expansive a change of policy than what Clinton or Edwards are offering.

    And as I’ve said before, you do don’t get eleven new Democrats in the Senate you’re going to be playing the same old Washington game in 2009 that we’ve just played out in 2007. Real change blocked by Republican’t obstruction (added and abetted by Joe LIEberman).

    So all this warm and fuzzy “change the tone in Washington” crap does little to convince me, nor to I hear Obama saying “I’ll get so many votes the Republican’ts will fear to oppose me.”

    Nor would it matter. Boy George II got less votes that Gore in 2000 and that mattered not a whit to him or his Republican’t allies as they took this country down the road to perdition.

    So yes, I type with a straight face (and a clear eye).

  • I miss the West Wing…. hmph. Were the writers of the final season prophetic?

    From what I recall, wasn’t Matt Santos also a candidate that the C.W. was saying was a far-stretch, but in the end won the nomination? The episodes on the convention made for great TV.

    Putting that aside….

    I live in New Hampshire – you all will chastise me, yet, I STILL have not decided between Edwards or Obama. I like Hillary – will definitely support her if she gets the nomination, yet (could be wrong here that I’m doing so), I am worried about her standing against a Republican.

  • In response to Anne, citing the disappointing results from the 2006 elections as a possible example of “false hope,” I would suggest that the Democratic Party leadership was given a job to do in that election and they didn’t deliver. When you hire somebody and they don’t do the job well, you don’t blame “hope.” A more correct diagnosis is that you hired someone you thought would do the job, and you misjudged.

  • Oh, if only Aaron Sorkin were available for Hillary. Obama doesn’t need him, she does.

  • I remember Bill Clinton’s campaign playing “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” and feeling hopeful. Hillary seems to want us to think about yesterday. Someone wrote that she seems to be building a bridge to the 20th century, that seems about right.

    Hope is about all we have left. The money’s gone, the economy is tanking, and internationally we’re about as poorly regarded as we’ve ever been. We’re frightened of the Muslims, we’re frightened for our jobs, we’re frightened that we might get sick and go broke because of it. The drumbeat of fear of others has been relentless while the things that really threaten us go unaddressed.. Hillary represents the old politics. I want a change. I want aspirations and lofty goals. I want us to try to be great again.

  • The reason so many people hate politicians is that they promise more than they can possibly deliver.

  • Hope is the thing with feathers
    That perches in the soul,
    And sings the tune–without the words,
    And never stops at all
    – Emily Dickinson

  • So, none of you who voted in 2006 did so because you hoped things would get better, but because you trusted things would get better…so your hopes weren’t dashed, your trust was broken.

    I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what happened to Obama’s anti-war convictions when he got to the Senate – or was he just, um, hoping the war would end?

    And maybe there’s something of that in what Clinton inartfully stated.

  • Dennis – SGMM said: “Hillary seems to want us to think about yesterday. Someone wrote that she seems to be building a bridge to the 20th century, that seems about right.”

    What exactly is everybodies’ problem with the 1990’s? Successful wars. Welfare Reform. Balanced (sort of) Budgets. Economic Growth.

    Going back to that would be a big enough change after the last seven years in my book.

    So what’s the problem people?

  • The reason so many people hate politicians is that they promise more than they can possibly deliver. -jen flowers

    Personally, I would never fault someone for trying to deliver on a promise and not succeeding.

    For me, it’s the pocket-lining corruption, bellicose warmongering, and complete disregard of campaign promises that do it.

    It’s one thing to try and fail; it’s another to flat-out lie.

  • Anne said: “I’m still waiting for someone to tell me what happened to Obama’s anti-war convictions when he got to the Senate – or was he just, um, hoping the war would end?”

    The Surge was “successful”, so Obama trimmed his sails. Apparently he’s lost the ability to say seven dead American Servicemen (and women) in a week is too many. Not to mention the billions we are losing over there.

    It’s his way of staying ‘viable’ for the General Election, I suppose.

  • I thought referencing “false hopes’ was an extraordinary thing for HRC to say, it clearly says so much about her mindset in a very negative way. I can’t help but feel that it was personally inspired. Maybe over the years her hopes have become “false hopes”, her marriage, the setback in Iowa to her goal to become President and she is deeply affected by this to the extent that she can’t separate her persoanl life (does she have one?) from her professional life anymore.

    “False hopes” just indicates that she has already decided what is possible to acheive as President and I think voters feel that is just not acceptable for the next four years after the enduring everything over the last eight.

  • “False hope” — that was when I thought Hillary was doomed, when she said that line right there. Not as you point out because of the way she said it, but that she said it at all. Because by now we see (as she should have seen) that voters are obviously responding to the hope Obama talks about.

    But since Hillary has used the line before, at this point it strikes me as a bit of worldview leaking through. And that suggests that she can probably never authentically embody hope in the way that Obama can.

    In other words, given the choice who do you vote for in these dark times — the candidate offering more or less hope?

    Which leads me back to doomed.

  • So, none of you who voted in 2006 did so because you hoped things would get better, but because you trusted things would get better…so your hopes weren’t dashed, your trust was broken. -Anne

    That’s not what anyone is saying at all. We all hoped it would get better, but it didn’t. We still hope it will get better, but we know we can’t trust the current Democratic leaders to make those changes. You hope for change; you trust people. The people can let you down, but you still retain your hope.

    That’s why I said I hope that Redi, Pelosi, and Feinstein will have a short tenure in their leadership positions. They’re absolutely worthless. But their failure doesn’t destroy my hope for something different, it just means we’ve got to go after them like we went after Lieberman. Either they’ll feel the pressure and change or they’ll go like he did.

    Connecticut may have still picked Joe, but not as a Democrat. The Party made a stand. That is what I hope will happen to all of those who enabled the war and are complicit in the Bush administrations power grabs.

    If I quit hoping, I’d be Googling for Britney Spears news or something to numb my mind.

  • The Party made a stand. -doubtful

    I should correct myself and say the people made a stand. The same Democratic leaders I cited above have still placed their trust in Lieberman in an effort to increase their own power.

    All in all, I consider their trust in him one of their greatest failures.

  • Don’t know what she meant exactly but I took “false hopes” to mean “unreasonable expectations”, yet I don’t feel the progressive agenda is unreasonable. We can have not for profit single payer national health care and we can get all of our forces out of Iraq etc. I would ask Clinton to be more specific about what issues she thinks we have “unreasonable expectations” or “false hopes” about rather than just alluding to it generally. Just saying…

  • I can understand that, doubtful. I’m not crazy about corruption and lies either. But like Anne, I observe that promises are made and expectations are raised and then the promises disappear under the slosh of trying to make government function. When I voted in 2006, I expected the war to end or be curtailed. That was not an unreasonable expectation considering the rhetoric.

    Hillary, and I am not a fan, is a pragmatist. The difference to me between Obama and Huckabee is a matter of the kind of fantasy being projected. The little kid in me really really wants to believe Obama. The adult in me still doesn’t like Hillary, but she was telling the truth to an audience that doesn’t want to hear it.

  • What cvcobb01 said…

    And in addendum:

    When you see your chances slipping you do not show weakness by breaking down in tears.
    If you can’t put on a happy face and fight on like a good trooper you are doomed.
    That is the nature of the political game…

    No… here is the unvarnished truth:
    Hillary should have run in 2004.
    That’s when her country needed her most.
    She didn’t.
    She over-triangulated, figured she’d would be better placed for 2008.
    Wrong.
    Time has moved on…
    The country has moved on…

  • I personally happen to agree with Hillary, and thought she did well in the debate, and that her use of “false hope” is defensible. Having spent 25 years in and around politics and elections, perhaps I am just totally cynical and jaded, but I completed get where she is coming from and I, too, refuse to get caught up in grandiose rhetoric when the realistic constraints will make it so hard to live up to. (That is, there is a fine line between, to use an example from an earlier thread, calling for something difficult but doable like Kennedy’s moon landing, and something presently impossible like Republican efforts at repealing evolution by force of will. I happen to believe near-term cooperation from Republicans is in the latter category).

    That said, from those same years in politics, what HRC said was just not good politics. There was no way that was goingto work. I sympathize with the situation — she has to try and take the shine off of the sparkly newfangled Obama somehow. His halo effect is way to big for pure attacks – they will backfire. Preaching your own strengths has not been sufficient to keep up with him. There aren’t many options left. But throwing a bucket of cold water on the starry eyed will only make them resent you, even if they do snap out of it.

    On a totally unrelated topic, this is not the first time I have seen the Telecommunications Act of 1996 tossed out there as a Clinton sell-out. This seems to be painting with a massively broad brush: that Act did a ton of things, some good, some bad, some good intentioned but unsuccessful, some simply a muddled mess, some that turned out so-so. I happen to love my wireless device, the rates per minute on which have come down every year since I first got one, and there are hardly any service gaps now. I love that I could leave the old monopoly and get a feature-rich VoIP service. Those things would never be true absent the 1996 TCA. (Not to mention records privacy provisions that simply didn’t exist before, anti-slamming/cramming provisions that didn’t exist before, etc.)

  • Hillary should have run in 2004.
    That’s when her country needed her most.
    She didn’t.
    She over-triangulated, figured she’d would be better placed for 2008.

    I don’t think she would have been viable on 2004. Her disapproval numbers (and the intensity behind them) were much higher then. And if a decorated war hero was too weak for the times, 2004 certainly was not going to be when the country let go of its sexism and elected the first female president.

  • Keep in mind that hope is not what motivates people to stand up and fight against tyranny. It is necessity. Like making someone who is starving go in search of food…he goes out of necessity…his hope is that he will find some food. We must deal with what is before we can get what is hoped for. Edwards is the only “real” change candidate because he senses the urgency, the necessity of standing up and fighting against corporate tyranny against the ‘money’ party, the centrist dems, the beltway insiders, the dinosaurs of pork…the porky pigs. He talks like FDR who said we must take our nation back from these “economic royalists” and their bought members in congress like Rockefellar, Feinstein, Pelosi, Reid,(telecom amnesty?…married to defense contractor…corporate campaign donations). It is Edwards alone who is dealing with reality and knows the fight that has to come to change the direction this country is going. I don’t want to hear, “we need to…we should… and one day we will”…I want to hear this is what we will do, what is absolutely necessary to do…stand against the corporate interests destroying our nation for personal greed. Edwards ’08…the only ‘real’ change.

  • Lance, in response to your assertion about eleven seats in the Senate, you raise an important point. Obama, by getting Republican and Independent voters to cast their ballots for him in November, will bring a positive boost to the Democratic “brand.” That, in turn, will help down-ballot candidates, including those in the hotly-contested Senate races. Hillary, by contrast, is a candidate from whom the down-ballot folks will run away. I remember a 2006 article in which now-Sen. Claire McCaskill told the reporter that she did not want Hillary campaigning for her, as she knew that, in Missouri, Hillary’s presence would hurt more than help. Obama can get voters of all stripes enthused, and with that, if he campaigns with Senate candidates such as Jeff Merkley (Oregon,) Tom Allen (Maine,) Mark Udall (Colorado,) and even the potentially polarizing Al Franken (Minnesota,) voters might just cast their ballots for those Dems as well. So, with Obama at the top of the ticket, there is a greater likelihood that we WILL obtain a large number of Senate seats– maybe not eleven this time around, but certainly enough to make Lieberman irrelevant, and make it harder for the Rethugs to obstruct a progressive agenda. Furthermore, as President, Obama would be wise to name Arlen Specter and Olympia Snowe to cabinet posts. Not only will that give off the aura of consensus-building, but also, more importantly, it will open up those two Senate seats. And, since Pennsylvania and Maine both have Democratic governors, the replacement Senators would be Dems. And, who knows– if all the hotly-contested races go our way this year, adding two more via cabinet nominations just might put us at the magic filibuster-proof number

    I know this post has been something of a side-note to the “false hope” discussion, but I think it is a relevant point when discussing the REAL hope of enacting a progressive agenda!

  • Caped Composer @38: Be it aSide-note or footer or off-thread post – whatever, thank you for your comment.

    Completely flummoxed up here in New Hampshire; loving it that all Democratic candidates are excellent – but I have to decide on one.

    What you write makes me hope it is so – and is helping me make a decision. From your fingertips to the tentacles of the flying-spaghetti monster, let it be so.

  • Zeitgeist: I don’t think she would have been viable on 2004. Her disapproval numbers (and the intensity behind them) were much higher then. And if a decorated war hero was too weak for the times, 2004 certainly was not going to be when the country let go of its sexism and elected the first female president.

    I didn’t say she would have won…
    (although ya never know.)
    Her presidential candidacy back then makes more social sense to me.
    It would have pushed the country in the direction it needed to go.
    She would have been a game changer even if she lost.
    Instead she parsed and punted and gave us Kerry…
    Who introduced himself with a silly salute…
    And then leaned into the swiftly thrown shit pies licking his lips.

    Also… I agree with Caped Composer very deep analysis @ 38

    But even deeper…
    I hold to the implications in my prior post:

    Lots of people have no doubt told Barack to sit down and wait his turn.
    The mere fact that he decided to stand up and be counted NOW!!
    Shows an unbelievable sense of self and history…

    It is bold.
    Magical.
    Magisterial.

  • Hillary needs to see that political campaigns are run on hopes and fears: it’s about what the voters desire or hope to avoid in the future. Railing about false hopes is what the incumbent party does to avoid a change in the political winds. The party seeking to gain the incumbency offers hope that a shift to them will inspire positive changes. The false hopes comment seems to play right into the Republican playbook.

    The 2004 election was all about fear. The 2006 election was about hope for change, but wasn’t a presidential election year. If Hillary wants to remove hope from the 2008 election cycle than she’s telling the public “Republicans, Democrats it’s all the same, nothing’s going to change.”

    Judging by the turnout for Obama in Iowa, there is a lot of hope that the future can be better than the last seven years. Hillary should be saying she can deliver on he promises of hope rather than throwing cold water on the vision that change to the Democrats will bring about a better future.

  • The Caped Composer said: “Lance, in response to your assertion about eleven seats in the Senate, you raise an important point…”

    Now you raise some good points there. I don’t know who has the better coattails, Obama, Edwards or Clinton.

    I do know that unless the Presidential candidate has a mandate to implement policies she/he talked about on the campaign, coattails will matter less. So I’d really like to hear more from both Hillary and Barack about the changes they’d like to implement.

  • I think that it is ironic that in 1991/92, Bill Clinton’s money backer’s in Arkansas advised him not to run and wait 4 years because of his inexperience, but he ignored them and ran anyway. I wonder if HRC had “false hopes” then?

  • There’s nothing attractive nor “adult” about claiming such-and-such thing can’t get done, elections can’t accomplish this or that. Indeed, all that attitude stinks of someone poisoned by GOP efforts to engender voter apathy and useless government.

    You certainly do not do the causes you claim to support any service by claiming they are unattainable goals.

    And it seems obvious on its face that the best chance one has at getting such goals accomplished is by building an enormous movement and electoral mandate. Which, so far, Obama, for all the complaints about his flighty rhetoric, has proven to be far more effective than any Dem politician we’ve seen for decades, maybe half a century.

  • Good post, Caped Composer. Glad you brought up Al Franken. Although I like him, he had better be very low key in this election or he could hurt the whole ticket. Reckless talk, by anyone, will be amplified 10X by the noise machine and could easily scare away independents and disillusioned moderate republicans.

  • I do know that unless the Presidential candidate has a mandate to implement policies she/he talked about on the campaign, coattails will matter less. So I’d really like to hear more from both Hillary and Barack about the changes they’d like to implement.

    Huh? The only reason we’re talking about who’s best at implementing change is because after a series of repetitive and exhaustive debates, the general consensus is that ideologically, little if anything separates the Dems on domestic issues. The foreign policy break is somewhat more clear, IMO, but that’s neither here nor there. They all want to build a large gov’t-run health market with generous subsidies to the poor, they all want to be very aggressive in curbing emissions, they all want to invest more equitably in schools in poor areas and raise teacher pay and create incentives for teachers to work in poor schools, etc etc. So…that claim just strikes me as, at the most, lazy. Even if you somehow feel that you haven’t heard enough policy talk, barackobama.com is only 1 click away, and has a whole host of white papers for you to read.

  • Webster defines Hope as: to cherish a desire with anticipation

    That is what the Democratic Party is selling, it’s what got FDR, JFK, and Clinton into the white house. They made me feel like anything was possible, like they had a real sense of hope and not just ‘grandiose rhetoric’ (Zeitgeist phrase). The difference being charisma. They were able to connect with me at a level were hopes are formulated.

    Is Obama there, no, but he’s getting close. I believe Hillary killed herself Saturday. She came off as condescending, like yelling at poor children for wanting to go to college. It was bordering on cruel and with out a doubt political political suicide.

    Hope is the Democratic brand, fear of course being the republican and only an idiot would go after hope on the D side or fear on the R side.

    I think that is why Edwards switched over. Not because HRC was the big dog, but because her message was so sour, only a republican would defend it.

  • You know Michael (Re #46), that is a perfectly fair accusation. I have not been to anyone’s websites or read any of their white papers.

    But then, I don’t read Hillary’s comments (I didn’t see the debate) as being about false hopes of policy changes. I read it as being false hope that one can change the atmosphere in Washington. That I too don’t buy.

    So maybe we’re just talking past each other here. I see Hillary as saying she has the experience to work the system to get the changes America needs, and I see Obama saying he can change the ‘game’ in Washington. Frankly, I know which of these I consider more arrogant.

  • I am not blown away with Barrack’s speeches. If you listen to them carefully, there is really not much substance in them. A lot of feel good phrases about “hope” and the like. “Where’s the beef?” Barrack is very intelligent and articulate but he is not yet ready to lead. For the Republicans he is just what the Doctor ordered in a general election.
    People, Hilary is the right candidate for the Democratic Nomination.
    The Republicans know this that’s why they are trying from the “get go” to thwart her nomination through the mostly corporate owned news media.
    We are once again naively playing into their hands. They want us to nominate Barrack because they know they can quite easily beat him in the November elections hands down. We were outsmarted in 2004 and it is definitely looking like we will be outsmarted again in 2008.
    Whether we like it or not, there is still a problem of racism in this country. I am speaking as a minority and I know what I face from time to time in my daily life. America has made good progress; in terms of race relations, but there is still a way to go before the ” a significant portion of the majority” is ready to put a Black man in the White House. Remember the Tennessee Senate election in 2006 with Harold Ford Jnr and Bob Corker?
    Some of those so called independents who voted for Barrack in Iowa and who will vote for him in New Hampshire are really Republicans who want to make sure they get who they think is the weakest Democratic Candidate. I totally agree. When it comes to an actual Presidential election, you will see most of that so called independent voter support for him disappear into the sunset, mark my words.
    I know as Democrats we are very angry about the state of affairs in the country and want a genuine break from the George Bush years. We however have to face reality and vote for someone who has been tried and tested against the Republican machine ;and has the experience to get things done.
    The day we nominate Barrack Obama as our Presidential nominee will be the day the Republicans make their victory celebrations for their next four year stint in the White House. The person the Republicans fear is Hilary Clinton and that’s they are trying to trick you into voting for Barrack and stop her in her tracks from day.
    Don’t be naive and be therefore be outsmarted. You will be dissapointed again in November. “A word to the wise”.

  • This “hope-monger” line is my favorite of the entire campaign so far:

    “Let me make one last point about the word ‘hope.’ I’ve been teased for the use of the word ‘hope.’ They call me a ‘hope-monger,’ ” he joked. “One opponent said last night, ‘Stop feeding the American people false hope about what can be done.’ Segregation: Could we have overcome that if it wasn’t for hope? Did JFK say, ‘That moon thing, it looks too far?’ No he didn’t.”

    I’m an Edwards man first, but Obama hit that one out of the park!

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