The power couple of Whitehaven Street are breathing a sigh of relief after having come through the fire and survived. "It was the first primary, worse than New Hampshire," Bill Clinton told a gathering of loyalists just before Independence day. "All the flak was coming from the websites, so it was tough to identify who was behind it and how much firepower there was."
In May, popular leftist websites like the Daily Kos launched a series of attacks on Hillary as a pro-war and centrist waffler. Then came some brickbats from veterans of Howard Dean's internet campaign team of 2004. This got Bill suspicious that Dean, now chairman of the Democratic national committee, was behind a "Stop Hillary" drive, forcing Dean to swear innocence. Then the media took up the growing grumblings from the Hollywood liberals that "Hillary just cannot win the presidency." This was music to the ears of the Democrats' various pygmy candidates, who get little coverage and even less cash while the junior senator from New York dominates the party's expectations. So the Mark Warners and Evan Bayhs and John Edwardses and Joe Bidens and their aides all chimed in that Hillary was "too divisive" and would throw away the Democrats' golden chance to win back the White House. Then the Cannes film festival launched Al Gore's second or maybe third 15 minutes of fame with his warmed-over global warming slideshow, and half the Democratic party seemed in open revolt against Hillary's assumption of a divine right to the nomination for 2008.
But then Rupert Murdoch, whose political antennae are acute, signalled his support for Hillary with an offer to throw the senator a fundraiser for her re-election campaign this year. His New York Post came up with this editorial: "Hillary Clinton yesterday won the unanimous approval of delegates at the state Democratic party convention in her bid for re-election to the US Senate. She earned it. The senator's been a hard worker, a good listener, more moderate than many expected and a champion of the state." Predictably, this sent the left ballistic.
By this time, Bill had figured out that a lot of of the sniping originated from the moveon.org gang. For Clinton, whose instincts are to personalise these things, this meant the enemy was George Soros, who has been a big donor to MoveOn and who hates Murdoch. But this time Bill was wrong, or at least exaggerating. Soros is not spending much time—as opposed to money—on domestic US politics, since his pet hate George W Bush will not be running in 2008. In fact, he is getting excited about Russia again, muttering that Putin's replacement in 2008 could be more important than that of Bush.
Hillary turned to the old retainer James Carville, who became the hero of the hour, calming down Bill, rallying support and drafting op-ed pieces about how Hillary can win in 2008 simply by getting back the women voters that Bush took from Kerry in 2004. And 54 per cent of voters these days are women. Between them, Carville and Clinton's old pollster Mark Penn managed to come up with some stunning polls that looked independent and authoritative. An ABC News poll showed 68 per cent of Americans describing Hillary as "a strong leader," thus solving what Carville calls the Democrats' backbone deficit, and Gallup issued its own poll that concluded: "Americans in particular admire her intelligence, her advocacy for women, and her forthright and outspoken demeanour."
Then Hillary found a new ally, New York state attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who is leading in the polls to win the governorship. New state polls from the Marist Institute found Spitzer and Hillary so far ahead of the Republicans that they looked like helping Democrats down the ticket win up to six congressional seats—more than a third of the total they need to win back the House in November. At that point, Bill and Carville declared a victory in the party's first primary and the rebels calmed down—for the moment.
Rummy's blunders
If the Democrats do win the House, their first target will be Donald Rumsfeld. Rummy has made a complete Horlicks of America's anti-missile defences—which were invented by the sainted Ronald Reagan and remain close to the hearts of Republicans, as well as Rummy's last loyal patron, Dick Cheney. Worst of all, the news broke just as the North Koreans started lobbing big ones towards the west coast that the Alaska-based systems were supposed to defend.
An explosive report from the government accountability office is circulating in congress. It accuses the Pentagon of failing to establish "formal criteria for what needs to be accomplished before declaring that limited defensive operations or subsequent blocks of capability are operational." The interceptor system does not work because officials in the first Bush administration insisted on rushing it into use without routine testing, and the report specifically blames Rumsfeld. The programme's "development has been unique in several aspects, including the pace of the system's development and the secretary of defence's decision to exempt it from some DOD requirements guidance."
As of March this year, Rumsfeld and his officials had still not set out the criteria that should be met before declaring the system operational. Further, "no organisation is clearly in charge of developing such criteria and ensuring they are met." As a result, Rumsfeld "may not have a transparent basis for declaring [the interceptors] operational."
