Hillary has a student problem, dating back to 1971. She was at Yale Law School at the time, as was her future husband, but while he was focusing on George McGovern's anti-Vietnam war campaign for the US presidency, she was intent on the law. She organised her civil liberties class into a rota to monitor the trial of Black Panther Bobby Seale, accused of being involved in the murder of another Panther deemed to be an FBI informant. (The case was later dismissed.) Her class, with their professor's approval, covered the entire trial for the American Civil Liberties Union, and Hillary had the bright idea of running their report in the next issue of a radical (and short-lived) new publication, the Yale Review of Law and Social Action, which she had helped to found. The name Hillary Rodham duly appeared on the cover as associate editor. When she opened it, she found to her surprise that the designer had illustrated the piece with drawings of the police as pigs: snouts, piggy eyes, curly tails and all. Tumbler has learned that the Republican National Committee—which first knew of this when they read it (thrown away almost as a footnote) in Carl Bernstein's new biography of Hillary, A Woman in Charge—has been handed a copy by a Yale alumnus. We shall doubtless hear more of this, probably in a porcine wave of television attack ads saved for just the right moment, after Hillary gets her party's presidential nomination.
Talking of McGovern, the old gentleman (now 85) was musing the other day that his experience in winning the nomination but losing the general election in 1972 could be an awful warning. "I'm not sure that an anti-war Democrat can win," he observed. "We haven't proved that yet." He stresses his personal loyalty to Hillary, but noted, "I lost for standing up for what was right. Some of our greatest presidents have compromised their positions in order to not offend large elements of the voting public. It's possible that's what Hillary is doing."
Impeachment makes a comeback
Beyond the fact that Barack Obama is raising more money than she is, Hillary's problems lie in the future. The woes of President Bush—whose war, immigration bill and administration are being abandoned by the Republicans in congress—are immediate and compelling. The pollsters have begun saying the I-word again, and 39 per cent of respondents to the latest Rasmussen report believe that Bush should be impeached and removed from office, up from 32 per cent at the end of 2005 (49 per cent said he should not be impeached, while 12 per cent were unsure). Among Democrats, 56 per cent supported impeachment, while 80 per cent of Republicans were against it.
Bloomberg to save the republicans?
Can the Republicans be saved? Some of the smart ones are looking to an unlikely source of help—New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, who formally severed his ties to the party in June as a possible preparation for a presidential run as a third-party independent. (Anti-war Republican rebel Chuck Hagel is rumoured to be a possible running mate.) The Republicans have crunched the numbers and now believe that an independent Bloomberg run could do for them next year what that other third-party billionaire, Ross Perot, did for the Democrats in 1992. Bloomberg, they claim, would take lots of votes from the Democrats in New York, New England and California, but only a few votes from Republicans in their southern strongholds. The analysis gets some support from the latest poll in New York, which gave Bloomberg a 66 per cent approval rating. The breakdown of that support by party was 23 per cent Republican and 22 per cent Democratic, with 18 per cent "non-enrolled."
Giuliani's scary advisers
That other New York candidate, the Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani, has appointed a pretty scary foreign policy advisory team. There is Kim Holmes from the very right-wing Heritage Foundation and former senator Bob Kasten, who proposed ending US aid to any country that voted the wrong way at the UN. Kasten also looked to accuse the UN Population Fund of promoting forced abortions. And Giuliani's senior figure is that original neoconservative, Norman Podhoretz, currently leading the "bomb Iran" brigade.
Bush's letter to Iran
The Democrats' attempt to force troop withdrawals is based on a series of amendments tabled to the Senate National Defence Authorisation bill. Bush's response, in a formal 10th July letter from the White House, contained a plain threat to veto any bill that "would require a precipitous withdrawal of troops that itself could increase the probability that American troops would have to one day return to Iraq—to confront an even more dangerous enemy." What few seem to have noted is that the letter also contains a pledge to veto any bill that would stop "the president from protecting America and allied and co-operating nations from threats posed by Iran."
