One political news was everywhere today: Hillary Clinton joined the race for the US Presidency (see article from BBC here). With the elections up in 2008, she joins another Democratic Senator – Barack Obama – in the race to get what we would call “the most powerful seat on Earth”. Hm, I do not recall something similar. Hillary is (still) married to a former US President Bill Clinton – a marriage that was less then pleasant from what I could tell. The affairs of the former President went public more than one time.
But let’s judge her apart. After the sudden rise of Ségolène Royal on the French left Hillary represents the change in the old well-established democracies that tended to be quite rigid and traditional. There has never been either a US female president or a French one. Think of it for a moment.
Of course, this should not be the predominant reason to support either of them, but is an interesting phenomenon. I’ve recently seen Ségolène Royal speaking at the PES Congress in Porto and frankly wasn’t impressed. I’ve neither been particularly impressed by Hillary Clinton, for I largely dislike American politics in general…and she hasn’t managed to make me change my mind. But she’s of course a better bet than GWB. As is Ségolène Royal better than Sarko.
Marko Bucik 
Brilliant minds work a like 😉 I´ve just been speculating a little bit about Hillary Clinton in my blog as well.
Nothing really to add for what you said but one thing that strikes me in general is that it is complitely possible that Hillary Clinton will be elected in 2008. Imagion she will run again and win.
In that case by 2016 the 300 million inhabitants of the United states would have been ruled by 2 families, Bushs and Clintons for 27 years. Scary? Democracy?
Already the fact that since 1989, for 19 years the power is so strongly concentrated around them is somehow a worrying factor in my opinion. What does it tell about the representativeness of American democracy?
Ps. A beautiful blog!
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Ha, true. This would be quite amusing. If we add the Kennedy family, we would end up in troubles. But they haven’t held so many Presidential mandates.
There would be one significant difference I think between the Bush dynasty and the mandates of Clintons (in case Hilary wins of course). That is the family strenght as element of campaigning. If Hilary has a bit of positive legacy (or negative, depends for whom) because of Bill being president before, the Bush junior had the powerful legacy of his family behind him. Which is not negligible, the Bush family is, along with Kennedys, Adams and Tafts, one of the strongest in American politics.
On the other hand the success of Clintons was mostly built on their direct work. So, another positive point for Hilary.
P.S.: Thanks for the “beautiful” comment…:)
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In case you are up to some reading. Here are some interesting entries about American political families:
Kennedys:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_Kennedy
Bush:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_Family
And the one on Bill Clinton:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_clinton
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Well, one thing is for sure. we’ll have a really interesting election race, with both parties having a couple really interesting candidates, Barak and Hillary on one side and Guliani and mcCain on the other. But one thing is for sure, all four of these can be attractive to voters over party affiliations which can help depollarize US politics.
At the end of the day, I hope Hillary and Obama join forces caus I think they can really be a great political force, caus they complement each other beautifully.
One last thing, reagrding Segolene. Yes, there are a lot of doubts about her abilities regarding real policies but let’s wait at least until the end of February when she is supposed to put out a political programme based on her so-called participatory democracy and then judge her. I personally just can not make my mind yet about her.
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Ok, two things. First one: Jure your suggestions is brilliant. I would really love to see Hilary and Obama in a team. Obama as VP together with her would be absolute shake and news for the world politics. Plus, they would have no opposition on the Democratic side.
For Segolene. I wonder if having her as a weak President isn’t the best for France. As a sequence of strong Presidents has shown, it makes it impossible to reform if you have them on the top. Sarko would thus almost surely block the reform of the Republic. A weaker Segolene would be more open to change.
So there you go: Hilary and Obama for the US to give it back an image of democracy and intellectual openess, and then Segolene to reform France. Who could match these?
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Why would you suggest that she would be a weak president? If I’m not mistaken presidential elections are followed by parliamentry elections next year and I wouldn’t be surprised if the socialist party would win also because of her popularity. But as I said before, I rather wait until the end of February to see what her programme will actually look like before I make a personal judgement on her abilities, cause, in fact, up to now she has been riding a wave of popularity gained by tiredness of the electorate with old political figures and by using the internet as a channel to gain support.
Lastly, one more thing on US. Although Hillary-Obama seems like an ideal ticket, I’m affraid they just might wrestle each other a bit too much in the race to get the nomination, so it will make it hard for any of them to ask the other one to join as VP candidate. Basically, I expect a lot of hard punches in the race for nomination.
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an address to your post was provided by Themelis Cuiper :), search engine result advertising ace – so you must be doing an awesome job!
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Kylee – I’m glad you spotted that. However, I have been away from blogging for a long time. I’ll resume shortly. Times are certainly interesting…
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