How old is this getting?
"I'm often asked, `Do you think you can win, particularly against Hillary?,'" [Mike Huckabee] said. "Folks, may I suggest to you I've been battling against the headwinds of Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton's political machine in Arkansas more than anybody else running for president. I didn't just win once, not twice, not three times, but four times in a statewide election against the Clinton political machine. Bill Clinton and Hillary campaigned against me every time I ever ran, and I won and they didn't."
And...
Giuliani opened with a quote Clinton had given to the Des Moines Register, in which she said -- as she has done in the past -- that she would send envoys abroad the day after she was elected president." The day after I'm elected, I'm going to be asking distinguished Americans of both political parties to travel around the world on my behalf with a very simple message to the governments and the people alike: The era of cowboy diplomacy is over."But quoting an expert from that Des Moines Register article, Giuliani said that Clinton's action would seriously undermine the authority of the sitting president of the United States and possibly set a dangerous precedent. "The danger is that you have two presidents conducting foreign policy, one with all the power and no moral authority, and one with no power," he said, quoting James Lindsay, director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. "Presidents-elect should not exercise their authority before they have it."
It's no secret that the Republican presidential candidates have been running against Hillary Clinton for months now, preferring to cast her as their presumed 2008 opponent both to rally the base and to make the case that they're best prepared to battle her (an electability argument works a lot better if you define who you're going up against.)
But this strategy may just be even more insidious. As Digby sees it, the Republicans aren't merely casting Clinton as the 2008 Democratic nominee, they're also running against her as though she's the incumbent, making the Republicans, as bizarre as it sounds, the agents of change.
I don't know if anyone's noticed, but George W. Bush is being disappeared from the presidential campaign and everyone's running against incumbent Hillary Clinton. Subtly, but relentlessly, the public psyche is being prepared to deny Junior ever existed. And it could work. For many different reasons, most Americans want nothing more than to forget George W. Bush was ever president. So, we see a very odd subliminal narrative taking shape in which the blame for the nation's failures of the last seven years is being shifted to Clinton (and the "do-nothing" Democratic congress) as if the Codpiece hasn't been running things since 2000. [...]It's an interesting phenomenon and one for which I hope the Democratic strategists are prepared. Their underlying theme seems to be, "If you want change, vote Republican!"
Indeed, unlike on the GOP side, the Democratic nomination fight has been largely free of any discussion of the Republican candidates. I'm not sure why this is. Is it the fear that railing against them legitimizes them? Clearly the Democrats would prefer to wait until the nominees are determined before wasting precious time attacking candidates who may not even be around next fall, but as Digby reminds us, there is a benefit to establishing a narrative about the opposing party early. As I've written before, I wish Democrats would do more to tie all of the GOP candidates to Bush, making the case that a vote for any of them would be akin to voting for Bush's third term. Instead, the Republicans are pretending Bush doesn't exist and, if we're not careful they just may get voters, on some strange subconscious level, to believe it.
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