Official 1994 William Clinton White House Christmas Card. Painting of White House Red Room by Thomas McKnight. Produced for the White House by American Greetings co.
Official 1994 William Clinton White House Christmas Card. Painting of White House Red Room by Thomas McKnight. Produced for the White House by American Greetings co.
Taken almost one year ago today- December 23, 2010- GIVE US HILLARY for PRESIDENT in 2012
HILLARY REPLACING OBAMA AS THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE
We advocate this DRAFT HILLARY movement not because of the desire to make political mischief — but to put the country on the right course.
It’s clear that Obama has been unable to build consensus and, with the polarizing campaign he is now running, will be unable to govern effectively even if reelected. Only Clinton can commit the Democratic Party — and, indeed, the nation — to a unification and healing process. This could allow Washington, in a bipartisan manner, to finally address the economic and governmental
crises that now grip America.
We are facing a crisis of national leadership, so citizens should step up and take charge of their country the way demonstrators in the Middle East did earlier this year. And, stunningly, as the people of Russia are now doing.
It’s time to take the decision about America’s leadership out of the hands of the established powers and return it to the citizens of our country. That opportunity to change U.S. politics will appear in the second week of 2012 in New Hampshire.
First, and most important, ordinary Democrats and independents in New Hampshire should mobilize behind a grass-roots effort to write in Clinton’s name during the Jan. 10 Democratic primary.
Second, a committed group of Democrats with resources and stature needs to help facilitate an authentic citizens’ movement — independent of party structure, Clinton and organized interests — to support a massive New Hampshire write-in campaign and put this before a deeply disaffected electorate.
There is already an online petition to draft Clinton, created by Democrats.
“We the undersigned Democrats want a new Democratic nominee for president who can win in 2012. We are convinced that the only person with the national stature, experience … who can win in the general election in 2012 is Hillary Rodham Clinton. We are fully prepared to take matters in to our own hands and launch our own massive write-in campaign,” it reads.
Even if one does not agree with their every argument, we urge everyone who shares our beliefs go to that website now — and to tell their friends to go to there and sign it.
Since 1944, when approval ratings first became reliable, there have been five cases in which the incumbent president had an approval rating below 49 percent a year ahead of the election. Each time, the incumbent party lost.
Obama’s approval rating has dropped to 43 percent — less than Jimmy Carter’s. Obama now has the worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history. Many, particularly on the left, have begun to demonstrate with signs reading,
DRAFT HILLARY 2012 ... Hillary Can Fix This: New Hampshire residents Write in Hillary Clinton for President Primary Day!
In a recent Daily Beast piece, “Hillary Told You So,” angry, frustrated liberals were quoted saying, “No one ever had to tell Hillary” that the economy is crucial, and “Hillary is TOUGHER (and 10X SMARTER ).”
Indeed, the most active calls for Clinton to run have come from the left — indicating that there is substantial support for this idea across the board and not just from centrist Democrats.
Certainly, the recent barrage of articles by former Obama allies saying that the White House has lost white, working-class voters — a key part of the Democratic coalition — is cause enough for Clinton, who has been that voting bloc’s champion in the past, to be the Democratic standard-bearer.
Many argue that our approach is impractical and is unlikely to work because Obama will not stand down. But make no mistake, we are political realists.
As political realists, we know that every recent presidential candidate who has emerged — from Obama in 2008 to Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and now Newt Gingrich — has been citizen-driven. The elites have not driven the process; ordinary voters have filled the void.
Clinton pulled off a stunning New Hampshire primary victory over Obama during the 2008 primaries. There is every reason to believe that, as a write-in candidate, she would get a substantial number of votes in the Granite State next year.
NEW HAMPSHIRE is one state where grass-roots politics predominates. As presidential historian Theodore White wrote in 1965, New Hampshire’s primary allows candidates “to appeal directly to people” and “over the heads of the politicians.”
This primary — traditionally well before other primaries — allows independents to cast ballots for either Democrats or Republicans, unlike most other “closed primaries,” in which only registered Democrats and Republicans can vote on their respective parties’ ballots. It’s justly famous for write-in candidates, who often had substantial success.
In 1964, write-in candidate Henry Cabot Lodge had an upset victory over GOP front-runners Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. In 1968, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson was not on the ballot, but as a write-in, he received nearly 50 percent of all Democratic votes.
A write-in candidacy in 2012 can send a message that the Democratic Party must stand for something more than Obama’s reelection at all costs.
We are not asking the president or the secretary of state to take action. We ask the people of the United States, Democrats and, especially, New Hampshire voters to exercise their right to be heard by writing Clinton’s name on the primary ballot.
Voters have had enough of the establishment powers dictating who can run.
All that is needed is a spark on the dry tinder of political frustration and anxiety. A few Democratic patriots can provide the means to make it possible — and change the course of U.S. history.
article written by: PATRICK H. CADDELL and DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN
If Americans in their infinite wisdom choose to keep a Democrat in the White House through 2016, let it be Hillary Clinton.
Increasingly the question of whether President Obama should be challenged for the 2012 nomination is surfacing among disgruntled Democrats worried about a solid Republican victory next fall.
They’re right to be concerned: the crises facing the United States and the world deserve better than Obama’s oldest established permanent floating re-election campaign.
There’s no doubt Clinton’s tireless and often effective performance as secretary of state demonstrates she would bring more seasoned judgment to the Oval Office than its current resident. Here are a just a few reasons the Democratic Party should bite the bullet and jettison the nation’s one-term Senate orator and try to elect the nation’s first woman president.
Beginning with the political dimension of his conduct of the war in Afghanistan to class war at home, Obama’s priorities seem to be governed more by his re-election timetable than the demands of the national interest and reflective responses to the galloping changes in the global order
Contrary to mainstream opinion, Obama is a mediocre politician. Were it not so, surely he would have known that people get wise to polished repetitive, but empty speeches — and know the difference between bread and butter now and pie in the sky later.
Joblessness and fear of watching retirement savings vanish weigh heavier on the nation’s collective mind than long-range climate change and health care reform. The president’s touted political instincts should have told him all that. But, as James Carville once noted so cogently, “It’s the economy, stupid!”
But while Obama talked jobs and initiated a jobs bill on his sixth day in office, almost all of his mind and determination remained focused on health care — his overriding priority.
There is more. Even a short and substantively fruitless effort in spring 2009 to get agreement on a new U.N. climate change protocol outranked jobs at home on Obama’s must-do list.
Health care came first, no matter what. The president spent a year getting it on the books, while he assured the country that his close to trillion-dollar economic stimulus program was creating jobs.
He lost no time proclaiming the recession over — blind and deaf to the reality that it was a “jobless recovery.” He saw the upticking Gross National Product statistics and forgot or never understood they reflected only record earnings of financial institutions.
Hillary Clinton with her wealth of experience as first lady, a two-term senator from New York and now the world’s leading diplomat would hardly have been so blind.
Obama’s economic stimulus was a bust because, among his many other blunders, he left the writing of the legislation to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in their veto-proof Congress — without benefit of Republican input. As a result, Congress presented him with a Christmas tree adorned with pork barrels, but bare of jobs with a future.
. Her party — and her country — badly need her services. She’s likely the only potential winner the Democrats can muster.
Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian journalist in Washington.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton waves from her car after landing in Myanmar’s capital of Naypyitaw, Nov. 30. Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Myanmar in more than 50 years , launching a historic mission to press the reclusive country’s new leaders to sever illicit contacts with North Korea and deliver on reforms.