Candor and authenticity were repeatedly cited. “I don’t feel like I look at her and see someone who’s telling me the whole truth,” says Allison Lowrey, a 30-year-old human- resources consultant. “I’d like to see her approach a problem without the polls” helping her make her decision, says Andrew Alebergo, a 39-year-old tanning-salon operator.

Bravo for Allison. I suspect the world would like to see the same thing.

The strategy has imploded. In a similar situation, Bill Clinton would have changed plans on a dime — he could have gone from B to E during a rest stop.

and two blonde’s in-between. If he’s anything – he’s damn good at campaigning.

The question is whether it’s too late and too awkward before those first contests, which are to be held in 3 1/2 weeks.

Not for her it’s not. Which is good for her, bad for everybody else.

It’s still way too close for my comfort. Sure there are promising signs of weakness in Hillaryland, but I won’t be calm unless Obama leads comfortably in Iowa. If I knew he would almost certainly win Iowa, I could believe he’d use that as momentum in the rest of the states.

It’s only three and a half weeks to go, doesn’t seem like much, but lately we’ve been seeing lots of upsets, so it’s way too early to tell what will happen.

Hillary’s problem in the primary is that she’s right-of-center here in America and she’s trying to win votes out of the left.  Sure, she voted against the tax cuts, except the one on capital gains.  If her votes had made the policy, investors would have been the only ones to get a break.

And on the war, she’s voted for just about everything Bush requested.  Its no coincidence that the weapons manufacturers favor her for their donations at this point in the primary race.  Although she’s funded so much of it with her votes and her committee work, she’s able to criticize Bush as "doing it wrong" and sort of tricking people into thinking she’s against the war itself.  She’s really just saying she’d be better at it.

But it seems like the candidate’s are so far from the public opinion on so many issues that the votes will come down to who is more trustworthy and likable.

Hillary’s health-care proposal has an identical cost as Bush’s last proposal – the $100 billion dollar drug benefit he pushed.  Like Bush’s bill went to the drug companies, Hillary’s will be headed to the insurance companies.  On education, Bush actually increased federal funding for education as a percentage faster than anyone before him. 

The notion that the Republican and Democratic parties are differentiated in the traditional "right/left"of economic and spending issues is sort of a political myth in my opinion – but one that’s useful for the parties to maintain.  The real issues that determine elections are usually related to social regulation – abortions, gay marriage – or war or how the average consumer "feels" about the economy.

Michael, if Hillary Clinton is elected president, I guarantee you she won’t be popular in Europe any more.

"hawk" image on foreign policy

I’d say she’s done pretty well since the weapons manufacturers are picking her as a favorite while she manages to hold on to a large part of the anti-war vote.  Forget the speeches, forget the writings and look at the votes & money – that’s the only place politicians tell the "truth."

her position on budgetary and social issues are consistently and mostly conventionally liberal

Then Bush’s budgetary policies must be liberal, too.  Using tax money to fund private for-profit corporations isn’t really "leftist" at all, nor does it jive with a "right-wing" ideology of free markets – although both parties have been very active in trying to justify such spending as a core value of their party.  "Corporate welfare" is something that both sides claim to hate, yet actually demand at the same time.

I’m saying the whole paradigm of left vs. right as a way to define government spending is at best obsolete, and at worst maliciously and intentionally deceitful on behalf of the parties. 

What part of the "left" demands tax dollars be used on for-profit corporate welfare?  And how is that different than the "right?"  It doesn’t and its not, so we’re left with social issues (where she is moderate at best) and foreign policy (where she’s the biggest hawk in her party)

I’m sympathetic to the ‘corporate welfare’ charge though, Jason, even as a conservative. I think it’s true that too many politicians of both parties are influenced by corporate money, and the distinctions that used to exist between the GOP policies favoring corporations vs. Democrats opposing them have been blurred.

Also blurred, but still very much in effect, is the distinction between the parties on entitlement spending, underground. You leave that out of the equation, yet even with the recent GOP being big spenders there is still a philosophical difference in the inevitability of wealth redistribution via govt policy between the two parties. Look at Hillary Clinton’s proposal for baby bonds, and Giuliani using it to mock her; obviously this is a prime example of where the base of each party lies.

The problem with the "corporate welfare" term, Christine, is that its users rarely if ever specify exactly which expenditures they are objecting to. For most voters, there are some government expenditures that are seen as useful and even necessary — infrastructure investments, technology investments, research investments in medicine and basic science. When the Paulistas use sweeping, generalized condemnations of "corporate welfare", there is no way to tell if they would wipe these out.

One thing that is notable from the Paulistas, however, is their glaring hypocrisy on the point of government spending as it relates to Social Security. While they pose and prance about opposing "corporate welfare", Ron Paul’s official web site promises to maintain all existing Social Security benefits for the current massive wave of retirees associated with the "baby boomer generation" with NO cuts, NO reevaluation, NO means testing, NO revision, NO reconsideration, and, most importantly, NO consideration of affordability. The ONLY way that these benefits could be maintained (any transition to private accounts would only affect later generations) would be through massive tax increases on current workers. But Ron Paul, being from the older generation and beholden to it, suddenly doesn’t stand on anti-"welfare" principle quite as strongly.

That seems relevant to this to me because it highlights the selectivity and arbitrariness to what id deemed an unacceptable government expenditure to the Paulistas. Just like with Social Security, the Paulistas would probably just say that any expenditure that is in their self-interest would suddenly get relabeled as an “investment” and not “corporate welfare” any more. Basically, it really does come down to being "corporate welfare" when they don’t like it and "investment" when they do like it. There is no more principle to it than that which makes them indistinguishable from the people they pride themselves on opposing. The term “corporate welfare” simply has no objective meaning.

The idea that we are locked into a fiscal suicide pact simply because "we promised" is depressing, to say the least. And, frankly, for people who pose as the exceptionally honest on issues of budgetary policy, I would expect the Paulistas to have a better response than just throwing up their hands and saying that it is an obligation regardless of cost or sustainability. It is particularly problematic in light of the fact that Paul’s anti-immigration stance (another anti-libertarian contradiction that his supporters overlook) would inevitably exacerbate the problem by producing the exact same labor shortage and retirement program funding crisis that already plagues Europe and Japan. (The ONLY thing that has helped keep the U.S. Social Security system even on the margins of long-term sustainability is immigration at a rate FAR higher than the official legal quotas.)

Well, it wasn’t and we have to deal with where we are now, not where we wish we had been. And I don’t think that any candidate can pose as the fiscally serious candidate while refusing to seriously address the Social Security issue. Ron Paul fails that test dramatically. And, by doing so, he and his automatons forfeit any claim to lecture the rest of us about "corporate welfare" or any other fiscal issue, IMO. They should tend their own ideological gardens instead of claiming not to have them.

Whoah, I agree with you, more than Ron Paul, on immigration. 

If you could show me a candidate who agrees with Ron Paul on fiscal issues and foreign policy, but is more libertarian on abortion, immigration, and trade – you could convert me!

I prefer Hillary Clinton to Ron Paul on foreign policy by a mile. Clinton’s approach, while curiously inconsistent compared to her earliest days in Washington, is at least more responsive to the realities of the contemporary international system and does not rely on unrealistic fantasies of a world where material power is meaningless and interdependence is a matter of choice. I’ve tried to talk over these problems with Paulistas, but they degenerated so quickly into name-calling that it became apparent that there is nothing behind the talking points and the cult of personality.