The Hillary Debate, UPDATED

TNR Online has a thought-provoking piece by Marisa Katz on The Hillary Debate:

[B]efore the Hillary-can-do-it-because-she-did-it-upstate narrative gets any more airtime, it's worth pointing out its fatal flaws. Namely, upstate New York is not that conservative. Clinton hasn't done all that well here--in fact, she lost the region in 2000 and remains a highly polarizing figure. And, when she has won people over, it's been through retail politics at a very local level. Ultimately, if she's going to do well as a presidential candidate, she and her advisers must accept that her Senate campaign doesn't count as a dress rehearsal. She's going to have to bring something else to the national stage.

Read the rest here.

It's only 2006 so it looks like we are in for two-plus years of this.

I suggest it's time for all things Bush and Clinton to move over and let fresh air in. Can we pul-leeze stop speculating about Hillary's chance of success and consider that there is no chance Republicans would allow her to campaign without going into full destruction mode, and we really, really don't need that again.

We need to choose candidates for ourselves and not let the Sunday pundits and Republican strategists tell us who our candidates will be.

UPDATES:

Read Molly Ivins, who tells it like it is:

I'd like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.

Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.

Read on here.

And Chris Suellentrop, writing as The Opinionator (sub. req.) in the New York Times, talks of these two items and adds a lot more:

Hillary: Don’t Run!

In a bitterly divided and partisan nation, is there anything conservatives and liberals can agree on? Yes: Hillary Clinton, please don’t run for president. Lone Star liberal Molly Ivins kicked off a wave of anti-Hillary commentary with a column last week that began, “I’d like to make it clear to the people who run the Democratic Party that I will not support Hillary Clinton for president.”

Sen. Clinton’s primary shortcoming? Ivins believes she isn’t liberal enough: “Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone. This is not a Dick Morris election. Sen. Clinton is apparently incapable of taking a clear stand on the war in Iraq, and that alone is enough to disqualify her. Her failure to speak out on Terri Schiavo, not to mention that gross pandering on flag-burning, are just contemptible little dodges.”

Arianna Huffington joined the chorus next, though for a different reason: She thinks Hillary can’t win. Huffington cited Marisa Katz’s New Republic piece examining the many differences between the red states in a presidential election and upstate New York. (The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, the New York Observer’s Ben Smith and the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber all expressed mild disagreement with Katz’s analysis and suggested that the junior senator from New York would have a shot at winning a national election.)

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo counts himself a Hillary Clinton fan, but he proposes a different reason for opposing her likely presidential candidacy: “political dynasticism.” “I think it’s just a bad thing for the republic, period. … George H. W. Bush left office to be followed by two terms of Bill Clinton. He in turn was followed by two terms of Bush’s son. If those two terms of the son are followed by the election of Clinton’s wife, I don’t see where that’s a good thing for this country. It ceases to be a fluke and grows into a pattern.” (Michael Barone, at his U.S. News blog, says he’s opposed to a Jeb Bush candidacy for the same reason.)

Conservatives are delighted about liberals’ newfound anti-Hillary animus. National Review’s Jonah Goldberg attributes the sentiment to Sen. Clinton’s recent moves to the right. “To be honest, I never understood what they saw in her in the first place,” he wrote in his weekly Los Angeles Times column. “[T]here’s something oddly satisfying in the possibility that Clinton being herself is politically disastrous. And, if she’s really just playing one more role according to some classically Clintonian political triangulation, there’s something equally satisfying to the prospect that even her fans aren’t falling for it anymore.”