A Clinton pre-mortem

The strategy for Hillary Clinton's almost-defeated presidential campaign came from an out-of-date playbook.

The Socialist worker, May 20, 2008

ONE REASON why Sen. Hillary Clinton will more likely be found next year in Congress than the White House is that her presidential campaign was set to rerun the battles of the 1990s rather than to face today's political reality.

Columnist: Lance Selfa

Lance Selfa is the author of the forthcoming The Democrats: A Critical History, a socialist analysis of the Democratic Party, and editor of The Struggle for Palestine, a collection of essays by leading solidarity activists. He is on the editorial board of the International Socialist Review.

Her initial pose as president-in-waiting seemed to assume that the Democratic electorate was simply interested in returning to a time before George W. Bush. Being a good sport, Clinton would play along in the primaries just long enough to eliminate other pretenders to the throne, before a grateful party would hand her the keys to the White House.

But Democratic voters had other ideas. And Clinton's sinking ship is testament to her mistake. Perhaps her biggest miscalculation was Clinton's idea that what worked to elect her husband in the 1990s would work today.

Clinton's political approach--call it "Clintonism"--was forged in the 1980s and 1990s, a period of three straight landslide Democratic defeats in presidential elections at the hands of the Reagan-Bush Republicans.

Continued . . .