Mrs Clinton’s short fuse could cost her primary campaign dear, argues alexander cockburn |
 |
The Clintons have always had short fuses - Bill was notorious for blowing up at his aides. Their private quarters in Little Rock and then at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue often rang with Hillary's invective at her faithless mate.
But Bill, one of the toughest campaigners in living memory, knew that the deadliest place to fray or snap is on the campaign trail - particularly in primary season, when each candidate strains to persuade the voters that theirs will be the steadiest hand on the tiller. It takes only a single public flare-up for the press to start using phrases like 'increasingly testy' and for deadly words like 'unstable' to crop up in voter focus groups.
At the best of times, Hillary is taut by disposition, and already her political prospects for winning the Democratic nomination are getting somewhat cloudier.
|
|
 |
 |
|
| David Geffen told the New York Times that Hillary was not the candidate to unite the nation |
|
|
This last week has been a trying one, crowned by the Oscar-night adulation for Al Gore, no favourite of the Clintons.
On the heels of his $1.3m fundraiser for Hillary's rival, Illinois Senator Barrack Obama, Hollywood tycoon and Dreamworks co-founder David Geffen planted a carefully improvised explosive device under HRC's candidacy.
He confided to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times that Mrs Clinton was not the candidate to unify the Democratic Party, nor the nation; also that he would never forgive her husband for ignoring his own appeals and those of many other liberals to give a White House pardon to Leonard Peltier, a native American convicted of killing two FBI agents back in the 1970s. But while leaving Peltier to rot in prison, Clinton did pardon financier Marc Rich.
Geffen's aim was true. Even though they enjoy political candidates tearing each other to shreds, Americans prefer to have the carnage tricked out with worthy appeals for 'unity' and 'bipartisanship'. The word 
|
