Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . . - Hardcover

Podhoretz, John

 
9780307337306: Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless . . .
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0307337308 ISBN 13: 9780307337306
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

The best-selling author of Bush Country explains how the presidency of George H. W. Bush has set the stage for a political victory for Hillary Clinton, discussing her advantages over other Democratic and Republican candidates and offering a detailed blueprint for derailing her political victory in the next presidential race. 75,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

John Podhoretz is the New York Times bestselling author of Bush Country and Hell of a Ride. He is a columnist for the New York Post and a political commentator for the Fox News Channel. A cofounder of the Weekly Standard, he has worked at Time, U.S. News and World Report, and the Washington Times. Podhoretz served as a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan and as special assistant to Drug Czar William J. Bennett. He lives in New York City with his wife and daughter.

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Introduction: An Open Letter to Conservatives and Republicans

The very early hours of Wednesday, November 5, 2008, are going to seem eerily, excitingly, frustratingly familiar to anyone in this country who is older than twelve, has an IQ higher than 100, and has ever watched a TV news program, or read a newspaper, or clicked on a news story. The polls in Alaska will close at midnight Eastern Standard Time, and that will bring to a close the casting of ballots that began twenty-four hours earlier in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, in the first presidential election since 1952 that will feature neither a sitting president nor a sitting vice president as a candidate for the highest office in the land.

And just as was the case in the two preceding presidential elections, we still won’t yet know which of the two–or three–major candidates will be the next president.

For once again, probably after all kinds of confusion caused by yet another set of ill-conceived and politicized exit polls that will have Republicans in a panic and Democrats in a state of unrealistic glee, the electoral map will have fallen into place pretty much as it did on the last two Election Days. States along the Pacific Ocean and the North Atlantic will be colored a solid Democratic blue, while the Southwest, the South, and most of the nation’s midsection will shout out in vivid Republican red.

The political operatives crowded together at the huge please-God-let-our-team-win parties in Washington–Democrats packing the Old Post Office, Republicans filling the Ronald Reagan Center–will be awash in anxiety as thousands of unreleased balloons hang far over their heads waiting either to be released in joy or to remain suspended in defeat. For the third election in a row, the vote counts in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire will be inconclusive. Anchormen will be explaining how if the Dems take Florida and Pennsylvania, the Republicans will have to win every other state to record the necessary 270 electoral votes–and then move on to an entirely different set of calculations according to which Republicans need win only Florida and Ohio to get there. After which, a panel made up of blabbermouth pundits, who will be getting punchy and maybe even a tad psycho, will fill some time until the “decision desk” can call another state.

And then, as the tension grows to an almost unbearable level, the toss-up states will begin to tip . . . but which way?

Which way?

If you conservatives and Republicans–you Republican thinkers, strategists, politicians, and voters and you conservative activists, intellectuals, and organizers–can come to a meeting of the minds about the seriousness of the threat facing this country in the next election, you can make sure that the balloons drop on you and not on the other guys. You can forestall and prevent the most frightening and disastrous outcome of that early morning. You can guarantee that the candidate you most dread will not be not standing in front of the west face of the U.S. Capitol alongside Chief Justice John Roberts on January 20, 2009. You can prevent that candidate from being the person who will utter the words spoken by only forty-two other Americans in this nation’s history.

Yes, if you do what must be done to ensure that this nation will be safe and secure and economically viable as it enters the second decade of the third millennium, you and your fellow Americans (and the world) will never hear the sentence specified by Article 2, Section 1 of the United States Constitution spoken as follows: “I, Hillary Rodham Clinton, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

You can end the newest American political dynasty aborning. You can make certain that William Jefferson Clinton does not get to move back into the White House and serve as history’s first First Gent. Eight years after his ignominious departure from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, amid reports that the White House had been trashed by outgoing staffers and amid general disgust at the extravagant pardons Clinton had been handing out like so many business cards, the man who turned the White House into a fee-for-service hotel and toyed with insecure young women and tortured widows and God knows who else in the nooks and crannies of the West Wing will continue to have to do his wretched business elsewhere.

The flip side of this scenario is also unfortunately true. For if you Republicans don’t get real serious real fast, if you don’t wise up and settle down and get focused, that will be Hillary up there on the podium taking the oath of office from John Roberts. Hillary Rodham Clinton will become the next president of the United States unless you Republicans can find a way to stop her.

And you can.

But to do so, you need to understand just how real the possibility of her victory is and what kind of challenge that poses to you as a party and a movement. You need to come together in recognition of the threat. You need to avoid the temptation that has begun to afflict members of the party’s more ideological branches–the temptation to threaten to break off, to secede, to run third-party protest candidacies. That will only get Hillary elected.

Politicians and political writers are fond of sports analogies, and when they’re looking for one, they usually go straight to football or baseball. Neither is the proper metaphor for what happens in elections. The sport providing the closest analogy is golf. Golf is a game played over a series of days in which a contender must not only compete with others but must also overcome his own natural human tendency to fail–to lose focus, get lazy, ease up, worry himself to death, get cocky and overconfident, or become selfdestructive. Usually, the golfer who wins a tournament is the one who makes the fewest unforced errors, the one who gets in his own way the least.

And so it is with politics. Elections in America–and in this case I refer only to contested elections, those increasingly rare events where nobody quite knows on Election Day which of the two leading candidates is going to prevail–are almost never won. Indeed, the real trick to winning an election in America isn’t to win it. The trick is not to lose it. In 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush won the presidency in large measure because he made fewer mistakes than Al (“Let me come across as three different people in three different debates”) Gore and John (“I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it”) Kerry.

Now, you can certainly make the case, and I would, that Gore and Kerry made the unforced errors they did because they didn’t quite know what they stood for and what message they were trying to get across and so they were superbly well suited to fumfer and blather and trip on their own shoelaces. You can make the case that it was easy for George W. Bush to stick to his rigidly programmed stump speeches, to say the same thing in the same way for months and months and months without going insane, because he knew at his core what he was running for and why selling his message was the best way to get to Washington (or stay in Washington) and do what he thought he needed to do for the country. Or you can make the case that Bush is a boring, programmed robot, lacking the kind of human frailties that might cause a Gore or a Kerry to screw up charmingly.

Whichever side of the argument you take, Bush’s two elections prove that not losing is a vital part–maybe the vital part–of winning....

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2006
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307337308
ISBN 13 
9780307337306
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
272
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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