Hillary has had a lock on Nov. 2008 for ages. She’s the sure thing.
But sure things are bad, bad, bad for the pundit business. Bloggers and op-ed writers need something to talk about about. The horse race is our bread and butter. No horse race means more Friday Cat Blogging.
There have been some attempts to make things interesting by measuring Fred Thompson’s manly quotient and taking bets on when Rudy is going to self destruct. But nobody really took those digressions seriously, because Hillary’s win was already written in stone. However, Hillary’s lead isn’t looking so huge in the past few weeks. Obama’s catching up in the polls and unknown candidates like Huckabee have been getting attention.
Might we actually end up with a real nail biting, counting chads sort of election?
Brooks writes that people aren’t worried about terrorism any more and that victory is imminent in Iraq (really?). He predicts that people are going to look past the tough candidates, ie Hillary and Rudy, and seek out a postwar president.
Brooks misreads the zeitgeist and underestimates the Hillary the Pitbull.
People may be less worried about a bomb in the Lincoln Tunnel than a year ago, but they are still pissed off about this war. They want vengeance against Bush and the Republicans who made this mess. There’s no sweeping this war under the rug.
Hillary has her own ax to grind. She wants the presidency. She believes that she deserves it, after working in the sidelines and putting up with Bill’s crap for years. She believes that she’s smarter than the other candidates. If the zeitgeist swerves, so will she.
This election is about vengeance. It isn’t about "the end of partisanship" or "national unity" or any other cutesy phrase dreamed up by speech writers and focus groups.
UPDATE:
Eli at Firedoglake writes, "Courtesy of Peter Beinart, Tim Russert, and David Brooks, it looks
like we have a new concern troll meme for 2008: Don’t Mention The War;
It’s old news, you see – people are tired of talking about it, and
besides The Surge is totally working! Brooks even claims that America is now in a "postwar" mindset despite, well, the pesky little fact that WE’RE STILL AT WAR."
