That is certainly how the MSM is pushing it. As if it were a fait accompli!
Probably is, seeing as elections in AmeriKa are rigged and stolen as a matter of course.
And they are going to sell Amurka on this woman.
This is why I have no respect for Amurkns:
They just a bunch of SHIT-EATING FOOLEYS!!!!
"Many warming unexpectedly to Clinton" by Sasha Issenberg/Boston Globe October 9, 2007
CONCORD, N.H. - Don Schwartz, who describes himself as "a super-Deaniac progressive type," decided to back Hillary Clinton - whose centrist views, he concedes, do not necessarily match his own - for a simple reason. He wanted, finally, to be with a winner.
When Schwartz, the vice chairman of the Londonderry Democratic committee, started to contact his neighbors, with a goal of reaching 100 people per week, he thought he would have to appeal to their respect for her rather than their affection:
"I was actually surprised how many people said they were for Hillary. Now, they're getting to know her, and they're starting to like her. She is a nice person!"
[Yup -- as nice as a viper!]
That reaction to the kind feelings the New York senator is able to generate has been a common one in New Hampshire, where a range of Democrats said last week that they are amazed to find themselves falling for the presidential hopeful.
Martha LaFlanne, 49, the vice president of student affairs at New Hampshire Community Technical College in Berlin:
"I actually like her more than I thought I would. I think she's proven to be her own woman."
[Yeah, she is going to be the next president. MSM is setting it all up.
Yup, everyone likes her!]
For at least a decade, the inflexibility of voter attitudes toward Clinton had come to be treated as an immutable law of American politics. On the question of Hillary, strategists of both parties concluded, voters had become split into two camps, pro and con, with firmly defined opinions, leaving few undecided and those on all sides generally unsusceptible to persuasion.
Yet over the summer, some voters appear to have changed their minds about the senator. On the key question asked by pollsters - do you view her favorably or unfavorably? - the numbers ticked in small but significant ways in Clinton's direction: a four percentage-point increase among those who like her and a three-point decrease among those who dislike her, according to an analysis of 77 surveys since early 2006 performed by Charles Franklin, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Now her favorability rating nationwide stands at 49.8 percent - on the cusp of the 50 percent threshold widely viewed as a prerequisite for a successful candidacy, according to the analysis.
The change has surprised many polling specialists who believe that it's difficult - if not impossible - to change the public perception of a very well known figure, especially reducing the numbers who view that person negatively.
Nonetheless, Franklin found that the divide in voters' views of Clinton is "hardened, but not absolutely ossified. . . . We're not even into the heart of the campaign, and there's been a good bit of movement."
That movement validates a summertime charm offensive that reintroduced Clinton to voters.
Adam Berinsky, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology:
"Because Hillary Clinton is so well known as a political figure, the expectations for average voters are hard to break. But in New Hampshire, voters are getting to know her better and separating their own impressions."
In many cases, Clinton's campaign has chosen - at what staff insist is the candidate's own direction - to do fewer events a day and before smaller crowds, to make a more personal appeal.
State Senator Lou D'Allesandro, who has not yet endorsed a candidate:
"She's taken advantage of the intimacy of the New Hampshire primaries."
At the beginning of the year, Clinton and Senator Barack Obama both concentrated their New Hampshire politicking on large rallies. But in late spring, partly in response to criticism that they were not connecting with individual voters, the campaigns began focusing on visits to diners and house parties, a shift observers say has particularly benefited Clinton.
Paul Begala, a former advisor to Bill Clinton who has contributed to Hillary Clinton's campaign fund:
"Barack is a remarkable speaker, Hillary is a good speaker. But Hillary is really good in a living room."
When planning larger events, Clinton has been particularly vigilant, aides say, at making sure the schedule maintains enough time for her to linger on the rope line.
Nick Clemons, Clinton's New Hampshire state director:
"She's made it clear to us that the minimum amount of time she'll do an event will be 90 minutes, but I'm realizing the average has really been about two hours. We are trying to find the crowd size that can enable her to meet all the people there."
In August, D'Allesandro invited 200 neighbors to his Manchester yard, where Clinton addressed them from the porch and lingered long afterward in the driveway:
"They were amazed that she would take her time to talk to them and have their picture taken."
Working the rope line at a "fall kickoff rally" in Concord in early September, Clinton moved more slowly and deliberately than her husband, stopping in front of each person to talk while he seemed to glide from hand to hand.
Anna Chen, a 20-year-old Harvard junior from San Diego, said after a debate last week in Hanover:
"She seems more human. Her laugh has gotten a lot better. Did you notice that tonight?"
To D'Allesandro, who first met Clinton in the 1980s and witnessed her during the 1992 campaign, such bonhomie is a new trait:
"This is a different Hillary Clinton, let me tell you. I think she was shy then. Boy, has she grown on the job."
During her husband's presidency, Hillary Clinton's favorable ratings swung frequently - reaching a low in 1995 after the Republicans took over Congress and a high three years later during the Monica Lewinsky scandal - but have remained relatively steady since she entered the Senate in 2001.
According to Gallup polls conducted this year, Obama, Senator John McCain of Arizona, Pope Benedict XVI, and pop singer Christina Aguilera also have favorable ratings that hover around 50 percent. For each, however, around 20 percent of respondents said they do not know the person or were undecided. For Clinton, that figure has remained exceptionally low, around 6 percent.
Billy Shaheen, cochairman of Clinton's campaign in New Hampshire:
"I don't think people will say they don't have mixed feelings."
In trying to decide what they think of Clinton today, voters find themselves wrestling with what they thought of her yesterday, and whether it was they or she who changed in the interim, specialists said.
Drew Westen, a psychologist at Emory University and the author of "The Political Brain":
"People are responding to the fact that they've heard one set of images repeated over and over."
As a result, the new impressions voters receive of Clinton are more likely to fit into the old frameworks they have for considering her, according to Westen, including the idea that even her charm may be calculated.
Lee Stebbins, 61, a retired educator in Bethlehem:
"I think Hillary has succeeded in helping to show her soft side. I think they've softened her. I think her image is softened."
Above all, conversations about Clinton tend to engage a far deeper sense of self-awareness than those about other candidates.
Voters are often left assessing less what they think of Clinton than judging the gap between those feelings and what they believe is expected of them.
Diane McGonagle, 56, who walked from her home in Concord last week to see Obama address a rally in a public park:
"I don't think I feel I have to like her personally. I don't see why warmth is an issue."
[Well, I don't like her, and I will NEVER vote for her!]
More FOOLEYS:
"Clinton reaches out to middle-class voters; Delivers speech on the economy to Iowa crowd" by Marcella Bombardieri/Boston Globe October 9, 2007
CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Barnstorming through small-town Iowa yesterday, Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton sought to shore up her weakest flanks by making an intense plea for the support of middle-class voters with an increasingly populist message on taxes, trade, and the economy.
Her speech on the economy to a heavily union crowd was an implicit rebuttal to charges, especially from rival John Edwards, that she is a corporate Democrat beholden to lobbyists and more interested in Wall Street.
[Edwards is right about that, as her fat-fuck hubby's presidency proved!]
The wife of the president who signed the North American Free Trade Agreement also vowed to review trade agreements every five years to make sure they are fair to American workers. She brought several rows of letter carriers and other union members to their feet with her proposal for an "Employee Free Choice Act" that would strengthen workers. And riding a campaign bus dubbed the "Middle Class Express," she went out of her way to say she would end President Bush's tax cuts for the richest Americans.
[That's when the elites started getting after your husband, Hil!
You don't fuck with the money; you just pander to the shit-eating Amurkn public, who seem quite hungry and willing to play fooleys!!]
"The pressures of stagnant wages, rising health, education and energy costs, increased household debt, and a softening housing market are creating a trap-door economy. Too many families are standing on that trap door, just one health crisis, just one pink slip, just one missed mortgage payment away from falling through and losing everything they've worked for."
[Just what the Globalists for whom you front for want, Hil.
WAKE UP, America, will ya?!?!]
But she still faces plenty of skepticism, especially among the many antiwar voters who point to her 2002 vote to authorize the Iraq war.
On Sunday in New Hampton, she went back and forth four times with a man who insisted that her vote for a resolution that labeled Iran's Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group gives Bush the authority to go to war. The New York senator said her vote last month was to help increase diplomatic pressure on Iran to give up a suspected nuclear weapons program. But Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, who are also running for president, voted against the resolution; Senator Barack Obama has said he would have voted against it had he been present for the vote; and Edwards has also criticized her vote.
While Clinton is way ahead in national polls and in the first primary state of New Hampshire, in Iowa she's locked in a tough three-way race with Edwards and Obama. She broke through to first place in the latest poll, released Sunday by the Des Moines Register, with 29 percent of likely caucus voters supporting her, compared with 23 percent for Edwards and 22 percent for Obama.
At every stop on the stump, Clinton has been careful to ask Iowans humbly for their support, knowing that like New Hampshire voters, they often don't like just filing behind the front-runner.
She told a crowd in a sweltering middle school gymnasium Sunday night in Maquoketa:
"I can't do it without your help. I'm working hard for every single vote. I don't take anything for granted."
[Yeah, yeah. Maybe if you blew me I'd give you my vote, Hil.
As it is, this is just pandering to voters who have no idea this thing has already been decided!]
Yet at the same time, Clinton continues to exude the confidence of a nominee-to-be, with more comments along the lines of "when I'm president" than "if I'm president." Not only has she not criticized any of her Democratic rivals, last night in Boone, Iowa, she said, "we have such great candidates running."
She spends much of her stump speech attacking Bush, not only on the economy and the war but for cronyism and mismanagement.
She exclaimed in Maquoketa:
"I feel like I'm going to get to the Oval Office and pick up the rug and say, 'Oooh my goodness, look at the mess they've left!' "
[Like she doesn't know it already, and like she didn't help them along the whole way.
Pfffffttttt!
We ain't fooleys out here, Ms. Hillary, so STOP TREATING US LIKE WE ARE, beeee-aaach!
We know you sold out to the Globalists, which is why you fat-fuck hubby has cozied up to George Sr.]
Despite her above-the-fray tendencies, Clinton had a surprisingly sharp response to Randall Rolph, 56, who challenged her on Iran. She suggested he had been planted by a rival campaign.
"What you read to me, which somebody obviously sent you . . ." she started, before he angrily denied someone had given him the question. They went back and forth twice more, with Rolph repeating that the resolution enabled Bush to go to war with Iran. She shot back sternly, "I'm sorry sir, it does not!"
Rolph said afterward that he is far from making up his mind about whom to support in the Democratic caucus, but that Clinton's answer had lost her his vote.
Most of those interviewed after Clinton's campaign stops yesterday and Sunday, however, found her more convincing.
[The Amurkn public: A bunch of fooleys who LIKE EATING SHIT, 'eh?]
Barbara Feller, 58, an amateur historian from Robins, Iowa. Feller walked into the Cedar Rapids speech undecided but left leaning strongly toward Clinton:
"She's talking about the real people instead of the top echelon. I just like the idea of the middle class being given a voice, being given credit for what they do."
[Yeah, never mind that she isn't going to DO anything for you, shit-eater!]
As much as he liked Clinton's stump speech in Maquoketa, Clayton Pederson, 54, a high school German and Spanish teacher, is leaning toward Edwards:
"It would be good to keep a couple of the other candidates around for a few more primary rounds."
[Yeah, and not elect her!
The truly representative ticket of the American people is Paul/Kucinich '08!!!
And the polls reflect the sentiment, too!!!
But no, the shit MSM tells me Ms. Hillary is the front-runner:
"The Perils of Playing Front-Runner" by ADAM NAGOURNEY
WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, ahead in polls and fund-raising and seeking to position herself as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, is doing what candidates in her circumstances like to do: avoiding risky moves, sidestepping clashes with rivals from her own party and trying to run simultaneously as a primary and general-election candidate.
The strategy reflects a growing confidence among Mrs. Clinton’s aides that she has so far weathered the intense personal scrutiny her candidacy has attracted. But it carries risks for any candidate — and particularly for one named Clinton, as she has found in recent days.
In trying to appeal both to the Democrats’ liberal base and to a more centrist general-election audience, Mrs. Clinton, like her husband before her, risks feeding into the assessment of critics that she is more about political calculation than about conviction. The point has been driven home these past few days in her efforts to present herself as the antiwar hawk: vowing to an audience of Democrats to end the war in Iraq while voting in Congress for a harder line against Iran, a move that some Democrats argue could lead to another war.
That vote led an Iowa Democrat to challenge her heatedly on Sunday in an exchange that ended with her apologizing for accusing him of being a plant for a rival campaign. And it was mocked Monday by a statement from the Republican National Committee that pointedly described it as Mrs. Clinton’s “Iran calculation,” and condemned by one Democratic opponent, former Senator John Edwards, who suggested that Mrs. Clinton was giving President Bush license to wage war in Iran.
David Axelrod, a senior adviser to another Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama:
“She has straddled a lot of issues, but I think this one was a miscalculation born of a misplaced comfort of where she is in the process. She got caught looking ahead to a general election.”
Beyond the matter of trying to please two groups of voters at once, Mrs. Clinton’s adoption of a front-runner’s posture has made her an object of attacks not only by fellow Democrats but also by Republicans, who see in her an easy target, and by editorial writers, now judging her as her party’s likely presidential nominee.
And her campaign’s apparent moves to limit her appearances in uncontrolled environments like news conferences and meetings with voters run counter to the political culture of Iowa and New Hampshire, even though such tactics are common for a candidate in the lead.
[So she will be different from Bush how?]
Mrs. Clinton’s advisers dispute the notion that she is engaged in an exercise of triangulation, to use the word that came to describe her husband’s politics.
Mark Penn, her senior campaign strategist:
“She’s been running a primary campaign that’s also been doing well in the general. The positions she took on the issues was that it was right to end the Iraq war and also right to be strong against terrorism. That has been the key to a primary campaign that happens to be successful in the general.”
Her aides also deny that she is running a take-no-chances campaign, pointing to the health plan she offered last month as an example.
Still, as more polls come in suggesting that her position is strengthening — an Iowa poll published in The Des Moines Register on Sunday showed her taking the lead away from Mr. Edwards among likely caucusgoers — the contrast between her campaign and those of her rivals has become undeniable.
While Mr. Obama, for instance, spent last week delivering speeches that set an ambitious goal of eliminating the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons and implicitly attacking Mrs. Clinton for initially supporting the war in Iraq, she gave a speech criticizing the Bush administration’s policies on science and announced that she was beginning a “Middle Class Express” bus tour through Iowa.
Nor has she frequently engaged in full-blown question-and-answer sessions with reporters of late. A review of her daily campaign schedule since Labor Day shows that she has spent much of her time delivering speeches and headlining rallies, with few town-hall-style meetings or other public events where voters can ask her questions — exchanges that were a staple of her schedule in the spring and early summer, and that continue to be routine for Mr. Edwards and Mr. Obama.
[So she will be different from Bush how?]
Indeed, the Iowa meeting where Mrs. Clinton was confronted on the Iran vote was notable precisely because it was so unusual. It was arranged after she had expressed concern to aides that she not appear guilty of hubris, and after reporters had begun asking her advisers about the safe road she appeared to be traveling.
At least some voters seem to be noticing that road. Mrs. Clinton came under fire after a debate in which she declined to say whether she would consider two proposals for dealing with Social Security: raising the retirement age or the payroll tax.
Steve Maxon, 60, an undecided Democrat from Wellman, Iowa:
“It seems like whenever Hillary is asked a question, she’s pretty good at evasion.”
[Good Lord!!! Could it be? Could it? It is!!!
Hey, I found ONE SMART AMERICAN in the MSM press!!!
Quick, call the newspap.... never mind!]
With the first of the nominating contests only three months away, the campaign is entering what promises to be a turbulent period in which Mrs. Clinton will come under greater attack from both inside and outside her party. And if past campaigns are any guide, this will also be a time of “Clinton in trouble” accounts in the press, inspired by missteps or any signs of slippage, real or merely perceived.
[Oh, telegraphing your upcoming "reporting" are you, Times?
Whether "real or perceived," huh?
'Course, not like the Times would ever MISPERCEIVE or MISREPORT things, right, readers?
:-)
In short, the strategy will now be put to its most severe test."
[As will my patience.]
