I'm not so surprised that the stimulus package is disappointing -- not efficient, fair, or expeditious -- but I am surprised that my party's leadership was so late to the topic, unclear about its goals, and apparently unable to get its message across.
I guess we need a President to get the right results. Or perhaps some other leaders from somewhere else in our uncivil society.
Here is what he said:
"in the final analysis, means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends."
The narrative of the 2007 Democratic presidential campaign was this: Hillary Clinton declared her inevitability and focussed on the general election, whereas Barack Obama and John Edwards challenged her ownership of core Democratic constituencies that typically dominate primary voting.
But in 2008 Senator Clinton, responding principally to the Obama challenge, is focussing on the factions that vote in primaries. She has repositioned herself less as a moderate, and more as the candidate of women, liberal activists, and minorities, especially Hispanics and Latinos. To this end, she has employed Bill Clinton as her Attacker-in-Chief so as to create the highly tendentious impression that Obama is soft on women's issues and a johnny-come-lately or even an ambivalent supporter of various liberal causes, such as Social Security and universal health care. As the Bill Clinton tactics suggest and her many micro-sallies and mini-attacks against Obama make clear, Hillary Clinton is now running, as did Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, to win the primaries, but at the expense of appealing to the broader base necessary to win the general election.
