Cox Campaign. Ed Cox, son-in-law of the late President Richard Nixon, will soon form an exploratory committee to prepare for an expected run against Hillary. His top adviser, Lynn Mueller, said that the campaign has already hired fund-raisers and a pollster, and noted, “It’s as close to 100% as you can get unless something bizarre happens, which we don’t expect.” Mueller also mentioned that a federal campaign committee would likely be operating by the end of June and a formal announcement would probably come early this fall. Cox’s camp has lined up Cathy Blaney of Manhattan and the Austin, Texas-based Olsen & Shuvalov firm for fund-raising. Blaney is a veteran fund-raiser for New York Gov. George Pataki, while Todd Olsen and Heather Shuvalov have strong ties to President Bush’s chief political adviser, Karl Rove. In addition, Fred Steeper, a veteran Bush pollster, will do the Cox campaign’s polling.
Girls School. Hillary gave the 2005 commencement speech at Agnes Scott College, a women-only college in Georgia. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sen. Clinton “received a tumultuous welcome when she walked onto an outdoor stage for the Saturday morning commencement exercises.” Said one graduate: “Everyone was screaming and jumping up and down. It was mass hysteria.” Hillary, herself a 1969 graduate of Wellesley, the-women’s college, told her fellow females that it is “absolutely essential to our national security and the furtherance of peace and democracy around the world” for the U.S. to be committed to helping the women of Iraq and Afghanistan. She also said that “you cannot have democracy if half the people are shut out,” and she drew her loudest applause when she urged the 200 graduates to “sign up for a woman President.”
Hades Freezes Over. One of Hillary’s oldest adversaries, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, has joined with her to support legislation to promote the use of information technology in health care. They even appeared at a press conference together, showing their relationship has come a long way since Newt’s mother told Connie Chung that her son thought then-First Lady Clinton was a word that rhymes with “witch.” Hillary also noted the irony of the situation, saying that “I know it’s a bit of an odd fellow—or odd woman—mix, but Speaker Gingrich and I have been talking about health care and national security actually now for several years. I find that he and I have a lot in common, the way we see the problems that we’re going to have to deal with in order to have a 21st Century health care system.” For his part, Gingrich said, “Let’s keep today on this [the bill]. Otherwise, that [the partnership with Clinton] becomes the story. We’ll do that some other day.”
The Truth Hurts. Joe Klein, the same author who wrote Primary Colors, recently wrote an article in Time saying that a Hillary Clinton candidacy would be a “disaster.” Klein said that even though “I like Sen. Clinton,” her candidacy would be “a revisitation of the carnival ugliness that infested public life in the 1990s,” and “the last thing we need is a campaign that would polarize the nation even more.” Then Klein got personal, calling Hillary’s husband “a one-man supermarket tabloid,” who would be a scandal-ridden albatross around Hillary’s hopes.
Hillary the Innocent. The trial of Hillary’s former campaign finance director has begun, and so far Hillary has stayed out of the crosshairs. The federal prosecutor took pains to tell the presiding judge, “There’s no evidence that Hillary Clinton was involved in this in any way, shape or form....In fact, it was just the opposite.” He also told the court that David Rosen purposely kept the true costs of the Hollywood fund-raising event from the Clinton campaign because, “He knew that after it found out how much he’d spent, he would be fired.” After all, “How were they going to react when they found out he’d OK’d $5,000 for Patti LaBelle’s hairdresser?”
Zell on Hill. Former Democratic Sen. Zell Miller (Ga.) has written a new book, A Deficit of Decency. In it, he says, “I think the 2008 race will be wide open,” and that Hillary has a good chance to win it. Miller recalled telling talk-show host Sean Hannity that Hillary Clinton circa 2004 would never be elected President, but the 2008 Hillary Clinton model might be. “Hillary will position herself much closer to the middle than recent Hillary watchers could have ever imagined,” writes Zell. He describes an exchange he had with Clinton in a Senate elevator after he gave a floor speech arguing “this country is rapidly dividing itself into wimps and warriors.” So Hillary asked Zell, “Am I a wimp or a warrior?” to which her Democratic colleague responded: a warrior.
HRC on the PRC. Hillary recently spoke to a New York state construction union and talked about the threat that Communist China poses to New York and the rest of the country. She told her audience that “we’re in a global competition, economically, and militarily, with China.” She also blamed President Bush for China’s unwillingness to trade fairly with us—saying that China’s holding of U.S. government securities worth nearly $200 billion—make China, for all purposes, a banker to rising U.S. debt and severely restrict U.S. trade negotiators. Said Hill: “It’s a little hard to get tough with your banker.”
