Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Wednesday, March 28, 2007 10:31 a.m. EDT
David Brooks: Hillary Clinton Can Win in '08
Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has no doubt about it. Hillary can win the presidency.
During an interview on the "Imus in the Morning" show Wednesday morning, Brooks explained why he thinks Hillary Clinton can beat the Republican candidate next year.
Here's an excerpt from the show:
Imus: Speaking with David Brooks of The New York Times and the "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" . . . I was talking to Chris Matthews earlier this morning, I asked him if he thought Hillary Clinton can be elected president, and I’ll ask you, do you think she can?
Brooks: I think she can, because basically I’ve seen her win over a lot of people who think they hate her; then they see her and they don’t hate her.
The second political hack reason is, there is a group of voters in this country who will swing back and forth. They are basically single white women making $45,000 a year. There are a lot of voters like that. Voters like that voted for George Bush in high numbers in 2004. Hillary Clinton is very popular with those voters.
They like both Clintons and they like her. So you get 30,000 voters like that, women and waitresses and stuff like that, and Ohio switches. She can win Ohio and she can with the country. That said, I’m betting these days on Obama.
Imus: She comes off as the single phoniest most transparent, evil person on the planet with the exception, I used to think, of Al Gore; but my view of Al Gore has changed now. She is an awful human being and to put up with that nonsense from that fat, stupid husband of hers is insulting. I don’t get the whole deal . . .
Brooks: Is that an endorsement of her? [laughs]. I’ll tell you the reason people like her. People in the Senate like her because she is substantive, she knows what she is talking about, so give her some credit with that.
One of her colleagues once told me that when you talk to Sen. Clinton, you can always tell what position she is going to take, but you can never tell how she got there. There is a wall there, and she will never let you behind the wall; and that is tough politically.
If she doesn’t naturally trust people, they may not naturally trust her. She may not win over you, but I think she can win over some . . . That said, if you look at her and Obama back to back, Obama just has more talent and more substance.
Imus: . . . Chris Matthews observed that he thought Sen. Obama was frozen in terms of his support because he wasn’t willing to take her on.
Brooks: She’s going to take him on . . . What [Obama's] got to do is fill in who he is. Everyone knows the personal style. He’s got to show he has some policy positions there; he’s got some expertise in the world there, some experience. The guy is two days older than me, and that kind of scares the hell out of me, that somebody that young is running for president. But, if anyone can do it, he does have the talent . . .
My problem with him is, he’s a bit upscale. He’s got sort of NPR-type manners, which there is nothing wrong with, but he has to connect with people who are sort of mass market, and I’m not sure he can do that.
Imus: I realize this was 100 years ago, but wasn’t Jack Kennedy 43 when he was elected?
Brooks: Yeah, he was, but he had been around; he had fought in a war . . . You know, Teddy Roosevelt was, I think, 41.