Days of Change

Day 1316 – Don’t Plan Ahead

They say that if you fail to plan, then plan to fail. There’s a difference between planning for contingencies and how to deal with them and planning so far ahead that you ignore those road blocks until they hit you at 100 miles per hour.

As much as Bill Clinton was planning to be president since he shook JFK’s hand in that famous photo, he also had to take an opportunity handed to him. He ran for president at a time when other Democrats thought George Bush as a shoo-in and used the economy to beat him in 1992. Hillary Clinton may have planned more but was not opportunistic enough.

Bill Clinton became governor of his home state and made his name as a Southern moderate. After two terms, the Clintons decided to move to the more powerful state of New York and Hillary ran for Senate. At this point, other challengers in the Democratic Party stepped aside and her Republican competition was ill-prepared at best. After winning a second term, it was assumed she would run for president in 2008.

In 2004, people speculated that Howard Dean was taking the country by storm so powerfully that he could win the White House in 2004 and the Clintons recruited Wesley Clark to blunt Dean. They must have suspected that 8 years of Bush would make people eager for a Democratic president. They didn’t have to worry. Dean imploded and Kerry was a terrible candidate.

I heard Don Imus today mock someone who worked on the Giuliani campaign of 2008 because he had no chance. In reality, everyone thought it would be Rudy vs. Hillary until the end of 2007. Edwards was Clinton’s only major challenger. Many PUMAs were Edwards supporters before they moved to Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama basically took the opportunity in much the same way Bill Clinton did. Both were speaker’s at a previous Democratic Convention and both talked about post-partisanship. Unlike 1992, 2008 seemed like a likely Democratic year and many jumped on the bandwagon.

Unfortunately, the Clintons are at it again. Bill thinks he can game the system by passive aggressively taking down Obama so that he still has clout in the party and can get Hillary to run in 2012. He may just accidentally get the person who let Bill be called a racist by surrogates back into the White House. He needs to stop working the con. Come out and un-endorse this fool in the fall. If Hillary is meant to be president, she still will be and there will be a country left to govern.