Hillary’s past a closed book?

Interesting comment found in the middle of a post from WaPo’s The Trail. Discussing the controversy surrounding top Hillary fundraiser and fugitive Norman Hsu, Dan Balz wonders whether this story, and others, will resurrect old Clinton scandals and hurt the Hillary campaign. He notes that Edwards has already touched on the issue of whether “Clinton is a risky choice for Democrats in an election cycle in which growing dissatisfaction with business as usual in Washington is a central theme.”

But what I found very interesting was this quote:

Howard Wolfson, the Clinton campaign’s communications director, said in a message today that the New York senator’s campaign worries little about damage to her candidacy from things that happened a decade or more ago. “Voters haven’t just turned the page on that, they’ve closed the book,” he said.

Is that so? So I guess voters don’t care about the past as a guide to the future? So Hillary can run based on her “decades of experience” but voters “have closed the book” on this ancient history? Call me cynical but I think this is an attempt at wish fulfillment on Wolfson’s part. Obama and Edwards would be stupid to not use this line of attack and clearly the GOP will continue to connect the dots.

Obviously, I think her past is directly relevant to her candidacy and plan on discussing it regularly. I guess we will just have to see how closed that book really is.

Hillary Quote for the Day

Andrew Sullivan on Hillary’s Character:

The character issue is really about having a president I can trust, whose words are connected to what he or she actually believes, and a president who can move us past the hideous and growing polarization of the past two decades. The words that come out of Clinton’s mouth are like round, honed pebbles on a beach of public relations and focus groups. She has got it down, and it’s smooth and round and aesthetically pleasing. But I don’t believe it or even hear it except as a series of ever shifting calculations. I know some of this is inevitable in politics. But it has come to drain our political discourse of real meaning and clarity. And the crafted populist soundbites of Clinton’s newest, Eva Peron-style campaign ad sound as empty as they may well be effective. She has taken professional politics to a newly homogenized blur of blather. We need plain English.