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Mark Warner Prepares Hillary Challenge: Deadpool, Anyone?
Hillary Clinton could be on a collision course with another likely challenger for the 2008 Democratic nomination for president, former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner – who’s assembling a team of advisers from the Bill Clinton administration.

Warner has hired Monica Dixon, former deputy chief of staff to Vice President Al Gore, to run his new political committee, and has retained a speechwriting team of ex-Clinton staffers.

He’s also getting foreign policy briefings from advisers with ties to the Clinton administration, the New York Sun reports.

Former Democratic National Committee Chairman Charles Manatt, now a Washington lobbyist, is raising money to fund Warner’s pre-candidacy travels.

Maratt was a co-chair of the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1992, and will "feel some strain” if both Warner and Clinton make bids for the White House, according to the Sun.

Warner’s political committee took in more than $14,000 from lawyers at the Clintons’ Washington law firm, Williams & Connolly.

Morley Winograd, former director of the Clinton administration’s "Reinventing Government” initiative, is also in the Warner camp, and he leaves no doubt that he is skeptical of Hillary winning the White House for the Democrats.

"Hillary brings to the race the baggage of her husband’s performance, both good and bad,” he told the Sun.

"The fact that she was such an important player in those eight years makes it impossible for her to divorce herself from it.”

Hillary is a "formidable primary candidate,” Winograd declared, but he said he doesn’t see "how that adds up to a general election win.”

Another Clinton administration adviser, former National Security Council staffer Ivo Daalder, has a different spin on a potential Warner-Hillary showdown:

Warner’s "big problem,” he said, "is that the Democratic foreign policy establishment is to a large extent a Bill Clinton foreign policy establishment and is therefore unlikely to abandon the Hillary Clinton base for a Mark Warner.”
Posted by: Anonymoose 2006-02-10
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=142261