Yesterday, Dick Morris wrote this in The Hill, dismissing the idea that Hillary would adopt the Mike Huckabee "play nice" strategy for the remainder of her campaign:
Hillary won’t avail herself of that option because it does not serve
her long-term fallback position: a shot at the nomination in 2012. If
Obama is elected this year, he will seek reelection in 2012 and Hillary
would have to face taking on an incumbent in a primary in her own party
if she wanted to run, a daunting task. But if McCain wins, the
nomination in 2012 will be open. And it might be worth having. McCain
will be 76 years old and the Republican Party will have been in power
for 12 years. Not since FDR and Truman has a party lasted that long in
power. When the Republicans tried to do so, in 1980 and 1992, they fell
flat on their face.
Hillary is using white, blue-collar fears of Barack Obama to try to stop him from getting nominated or elected.
She
is playing on his “elitism” by hammering him on blue-collar issues and
is mincing no words in painting him as a stranger to blue-collar white
America.
Hillary is attracting the votes of cops,
firefighters, construction workers, union members. Are they in love
with Hillary? They can’t stand her. But they are terrified of the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and the various influences to which
Obama seems to be subject. By playing on those fears, Hillary is
undermining Obama’s ability to get elected.
This is not a
byproduct of her continued candidacy — it is the goal. She, the
consummate realist, must know that she has no practical shot at the
nomination herself after her numbing loss in North Carolina and her
paper-thin margin in Indiana. But she welcomes the opportunity an
ongoing candidacy offers to bash Obama and to drive a wedge between him
and the voters he must have to beat McCain.
When I first read this, my initial response was that Dick Morris was full of it and that his hatred of the Clintons really knew no bounds. But, in light of this (which happened after Morris wrote his column), now I wonder if he really does know what he's talking about. Scary thought.
--Jason Zengerle