Hillary Dean?

Yesterday Hillary Clinton announced she's in for the nomination race for Democrat presidential candidate. She's not the first women to run for the Presidential nomination in the states (the Republicans beat the Democrats to that honour when Margaret Chase Smith ran for the 1964 nomination), but the first one to do so for a major party in a very long time.

Clearly Howard Dean's upstart campaign for the 2004 nomination made an impression. Her campaign site looks like Dean's on steroids. You can even "win" a contest to be the very first post on her blog. Not sure that's exactly what you call open space but I'll suspend judgement until I see the tone of the post they pick as the winner.

Comments

[Sven Biggs]

Of the Dems that have tossed their hats into the ring for '08 I think John Edwards is doing the best job of following the Dean/Trippi model. Edwards blog is an open public form and his One Corps looks like a carbon copy of Dean Corps.

Coincidently Edwards also seems to be the candidate making the most noise about Climate Change. Besides making it one of the themes of his campaign he has declared Jan 27th a National Day of Energy Action as the first in a series of days of national action for his One Corps volunteers.

Personally I am just glad to see that the issue of climate change as finally made it on to the Democratic agenda, I just hope they are still talking about it after the convention.

http://johnedwards.com/

[Bob Broughton]

Just a quibble: I watched some of the 1964 Republican Convention on TV; it was the one that nominated Barry Goldwater. (How's that for dating myself?)

Margaret Chase Smith was classified as a "favorite son" candidate, something that used to be commonplace at US party conventions, but has gone the way of the dinosaur because of the profusion of primaries. It was a way of keeping first-ballot votes away from the front-runners, giving that state (Maine, in this case) more bargaining power on subsequent ballots.

In other words, Smith was a paper candidate. She didn't run in primaries, hunt for votes at delegate selection meetings, or anything like that. If you look at the balloting results, you'll find that most, if not all, of her votes came from Maine.