Thursday, October 30, 2014

Hillary at the Hamburg, Beret for Breakfast

So this happened.
My beret has suddenly taken on the flavor of a pie shake.
And of course, after six years of loudly demanding that Hillary do exactly this, I'm stuck at the office when it happens.

Yet I don't feel bad about missing out. Notice was extremely short, and word was that some well deserving volunteers got there in the nick of time and got their moment. I've had that moment more times than I deserve or can count, and right now I'm exactly where I need to be in the process:doing my official duties, and writing what and when I can.

The official duties are heavy enough that the writing and especially the event attending are falling by the wayside. If I was still a pro like I was in 2007-08, I'd be all over the high profile guests like McCain and Rand Paul and Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar and so many more that I can't remember because when I know I can't attend stuff I tune out the details. The only detail I can remember right now is MAILED BALLOTS NOT YET RETURNED 7199.

(Oh, and for those using the oldest excuse in the book, the one that makes you feel responsible for procrastinating? Here's your "research on the judges." That's it.All that exists. tl;dr version: vote yes on all of them. Now turn your %$@&! ballot in.)

But even though it's five days out from 2014, I have to jump out for a moment and look at 2016. This stop, and the rest of yesterday's Iowa swing, is encouraging. Sure, the event wasn't announced, but there was a small but real risk of running into Random Hostile Questioner, underscored by the deliciously ironic too good to make up fact that Johnson County REPUBLICAN chair Bill Keettel just happened to be there.

(Sincere thanks to Bill and his crew for helping recruit poll workers this week. We could still use a few, but we're most of the way there.)


But elsewhere, in the QC, there were still signs of the 2007ish desire to control the situation.

I vividly remember exactly this from New Years Day 2008: staffers herding me away from Real People, and the lack of Q and A. (I know EXACTLY the question I want to ask or hear, and it's not about First In The Nation. It's a foreign policy thing that you'll have to ask me about in person because I'm not comfortable writing it.)

And there's also Elizabeth Warren in the wings, with a message more tuned into the post-2008 crash domestic concerns that grew during the five years Clinton was in a foreign policy bubble.
“Just looking at [Clinton’s] past, she can’t start saying populist words and feel like they resonate with people’s experiences with power,” Teachout said. “She continues to show she’s missing where the country is. … the modern American experience right now is one of a real sense that economic and political power are getting concentrated, and people [are getting] left out.”

For Clinton, the risk in moving her language closer to Warren’s is not so much that she’ll offend her donor base — most of her Wall Street supporters have said for months, even after the “corporations and businesses” comment, that they expected her to have to bend toward the base of her party. That certainly beats a Warren nomination in their view.

The greater worry for Clinton is holding onto and turning out her base of working-class moderates, who bolstered her in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio during the 2008 primaries.
There will be more time for all that kind of speculation next week. Entertain yourself over one more cup of coffee with this Maggie Haberman/Glenn Thrush long read on Hillary16, then get back to work.
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