I’ve been steeling myself for disaster, as it’s been looking (to me) like she was going to be a juggernaut in primary season, then get slaughtered in the general. But a couple recent articles have caused me to rethink this judgment.
Dick Morris, who is undeniably slimy but who also knows his stuff when it comes to politics, recently wrote:
Those who would stick their heads in the sand and maintain that Sen. Hillary Clinton could never be elected president are in for a rude shock, according to the latest data from the Fox News survey.
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The Fox News poll tested Hillary against several possible 2008 GOP contenders and found that she ran ahead of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by 46-35, ahead of New York Gov. George Pataki by 41-35 and ahead of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-TN, by 40-33.
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(continued below fold)
When Fox News matched the former first lady against Jeb Bush in a trial heat, Hillary’s numbers were similar to those former presidential candidate Kerry racked up in a parallel test.
Among men, for example, Hillary defeated Jeb Bush by 44-39 while Kerry broke even, 42-42. While 23 percent of conservatives supported Hillary against the president’s brother, only 21 percent backed Kerry in a similar contest.
Geographically, Hillary beat Southerners Jeb Bush and Frist in the South, beating Bush in the red-state region by 42-41 and Frist by 38-37. And, in the critical Midwest, where most swing states are located, Hillary ran 11 points ahead of Jeb Bush, 10 ahead of Frist and six ahead of Pataki.
The strongest candidate against Hillary is, of course, Rudy Guiliani, whom an earlier Fox News poll showed beating her by almost 10 points. But the former New York City mayor will have a hard time winning the Republican nomination. Can a pro-abortion-rights, pro-affirmative-action, pro-gay-rights, pro-gun-control, pro-immigration moderate win Republican primaries?
Ultimately, the only Republican who may be able to beat Hillary is Bush’s nominee for secretary of state, Condeleezza Rice. Able to appeal to black and female voters without sacrificing support among whites and men, Condi could be the only figure who stands between Hillary and the White House.
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Will Condi run? It is very important that she does.
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Hillary will be the strongest Democratic candidate since her husband ran.
That’s pretty enticing stuff! I put a lot of stock in Morris’s opinion. He is a Republican, but I don’t believe his prediction is spin. He would prefer above everything to be proven right, and so he tries to call it as accurately as possible.
Morris is guilty of some gratuitous spin, though:
Like Bill, she will tack to the center and take a traditional line on controversial social issues like gay marriage. But we must always remember that while Bill is a moderate who becomes a liberal when he must, that Hillary is a liberal who pretends moderation when she has to.
In the June 6 Nation, Greg Sargent writes a long, interesting piece on Hillary’s prospects that includes a response to that last jab from Morris.
It does a disservice to the piece, really, to excerpt it–but I’m going to do so anyway to highlight a few things (please do read the whole thing first if you can):
“What I see happening in Washington,” Clinton continued, “is a concerted effort by the Administration and the leadership in Congress to really create absolute power. They want to control the judiciary so they can have all three branches of government. I really don’t care what party you are–that’s not in the American tradition…. Right now young men and women are putting their lives on the line in Iraq and Afghanistan, fighting for the America we revere. And that is a country where nobody has all the answers–and nobody should have all the power…. We all need to stand up for what made America great–what created a wonderful set of values that we revere, that we exported and tried to really inculcate in people around the world!”
Wild applause rolled over Clinton now, although it was unclear whether the crowd had appreciated the political subtleties of what they’d witnessed. She had offered a critique of the GOP sharp enough for any progressive–even as she’d given an approving nod to American exceptionalism and a paean to US troops defending our “values” abroad. She’d stoked the partisan passions of her audience–even as she’d sounded an above-partisanship note of concern about the state of the Republic. Indeed, she’d managed to pull off what many Democrats struggle to do these days: She’d weaved her criticisms into a larger narrative about America’s past and future, criticizing the GOP leadership without sounding as if she wanted America to fail–when she said she was “worried” about America, you believed her.
Not long after that speech, Clinton appeared at a dramatically different event, a speech to a roomful of around 300 farmers. These were hard-bitten people who were fully prepared to believe that the Senator from Chappaqua is who her caricaturists say she is. When Clinton strode into that room, she was an entirely different Hillary from the one who’d addressed Democrats only hours earlier. Anyone accustomed to seeing Clinton on TV–where she sometimes seems stiff and insincere–would have been flabbergasted by her sudden transformation. She instantly, and effortlessly, became Homespun Hillary. Her vowels grew flatter, more rural-sounding. “Little” became “li’l.” “Get” became “git.” Entire pronouns vanished, as in: “Heard there are some places in California selling gas for three dollars a gall’n.” She poked fun at city folk. Speaking about how farmers could make money supplying the specialty produce that New York restaurants need, she mimicked a demand made to her by city restaurateurs: “We need all those little funny things you don’t know what they are when they put ’em on your plate.”
The crowd seemed especially impressed with her command of their pocketbook issues. She talked about fuel prices, protecting farmers from foreign competition, the Senate’s neglect of New York agriculture in favor of Western agribusiness. She touted an initiative she’d spearheaded making it easier for local businesspeople to sell products via the Internet: “Fella made fly-fishing rods and lures–all of a sudd’n found there were people in Norway who wanted to buy th’m!”
By the end, you could feel it: Her audience had been won over. Her listeners filed out, murmuring approval of what they’d heard. As Robert Madison, a Republican and owner of a small local dairy farm with his three sons, put it: “Real down-to-earth person. Knows what she wants to do for the farmer.”
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Take the Santorum press conference. You can endlessly debate whether popular entertainment hurts kids, or whether government should fix the problem. Yet if there’s one thing most middle-of-the-road parents can agree on, it’s that they are worried about how pop culture affects their children. By appearing with a right-wing Republican loathed by liberal Dems, she’s essentially telling moderate Republicans, “parenting should transcend ideology, so this Democrat will stand with anyone if it might help kids.” Yes, it legitimizes Santorum. But it also helps to defuse an undeniably potent right-wing strategy: the effort to paint Dems as antifamily.Or take the abortion speech. You could argue that while it might have been discomfiting to prochoice groups, it’s actually a smart tactical response to the right’s increasingly successful strategy of painting prochoicers as ideological extremists. Polls consistently show that majorities favor legalized abortion. But decades of conservative attacks have fooled voters into believing that prochoice groups are to the left of public opinion. The speech wasn’t really about abortion policy; it was about what to do before conception to reduce pregnancies, and while Clinton stressed teen abstinence, her main focus was on encouraging birth control, a stance objectionable only to the hard right.
The political beauty of this, as NewDonkey.com’s Ed Kilgore has observed, is that it makes a subtle play for Republican moderates by forcing right-wing ideologues to reveal themselves as the true extremists, as foes of the common-sense goal of lowering rates of unwanted pregnancies. “When Democrats speak this way about abortion,” says one senior Hillary adviser, “it drives a wedge between sensible Republicans, who want to reduce the amount of abortions, and the right-wing crazies, whose main goal is to stop people from having sex.”
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[T]he “new moderate” Senator Clinton has compiled quite a liberal voting record. If you don’t believe it, just ask the liberal group Americans for Democratic Action. In 2004, ADA says, the Senator earned a “liberal quotient” of 95 percent (compare that to, say, John Edwards at 60 percent, or the Democratic senators as a whole, at 85 percent).What about Clinton’s biggest lapse–her Iraq vote? For some antiwar progressives, no doubt, it will be a deal-breaker. And, of course, they are unlikely to be comforted by the fact that she really thought she was doing the right thing, as people who are close to her insist she did. Yet to focus on that one vote, again, misses the larger goal of Clinton’s politics. As she recognizes, the Democratic Party’s problem on national security far transcends the Iraq vote. Decades of assaults on Dems from the right (helped along by international fiascoes presided over by Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter) have succeeded in persuading Americans that Dems are fundamentally uncomfortable with the application of American “hard” power abroad. As Clinton well knows, this is not something that can be corrected by merely donning a pair of plastic hawk’s wings. It’s a perception problem that will take a long time–and a lot of hard work–to reverse. So she’s methodically built up a comfort level–and comfort is the key–with national security issues, joining the Armed Services Committee and spending countless hours mastering military arcana. This approach is far more involved and politically shrewd than just talking tough on the Sunday chat shows. It’s not off-putting to the Democratic base, which loathes Joe Lieberman-style militaristic posturing. And it comes across as genuine, because it’s rooted in Clinton’s strategy of emphasizing smart, pragmatic government over ideology.
Of course, sitting on Armed Services is hardly a substitute for articulating a sweeping foreign policy vision that can compete with GOP militarism. But it may be a necessary first step. Polls indicate that there’s rising disquiet with the direction of Bush’s foreign policies. At the same time, Americans appear consistently more comfortable entrusting foreign policy to the GOP. What that suggests is that perhaps the real problem Dems have on national security is not just the quality of their ideas but that moderates simply won’t listen to them. That in turn suggests that one key to reversing Democratic decline in the foreign policy arena is to do what Bill Clinton managed to accomplish on various domestic issues: Get moderates to open their ears. Which is, arguably, the larger context of Hillary’s Iraq vote. “Putting aside whether her vote was a mistake, which I think it was, she voted what she believed to be right,” says John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress and President Clinton’s former chief of staff. “The larger end result may be that the middle of the country sees a senator with a tough nose who is not afraid to use force.”
For months Democrats–and some outside the party–have been saying that Hillary can’t win in 2008. You’ve heard the arguments: She starts out with 40 percent against her. She will energize GOP turnout–not to mention fundraising–like nobody else. Sure, Republicans have decided they like the real Hillary. But as Michelle Cottle wrote in The New Republic, “the bulk of the electorate, all those folks who won’t tune into the race until after Labor Day ’08, will be voting on Hillary the icon.”
That all may turn out to be true. What’s more, the retail politics Clinton has mastered may be lost on the gargantuan stage of a presidential race. And the right’s ability to dominate the news cycle these days may guarantee that Hillary’s skills remain beside the point–her enduring First Lady image could trump her actual politics and persona. “You just have to accept the fact that with any Clinton, the media is going to be difficult,” Grunwald says. “You don’t ask why. You just deal.”
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[I]f nothing else, she’s at least beginning to develop a Democratic alternative that could constitute one path to political success. “Hillary may not be an iconic liberal, but she fights for the people liberals care about–women, children, veterans, people without healthcare,” Podesta says. “Best of all, she’s tough, and she knows how to win.”
That last point that I bolded is perhaps most important. I do think that the caveats made in the last few paragraphs I quoted are still real obstacles, and I still can’t see myself voting for her in the primary. But the strategy she (or maybe Bill?) has chosen is truly a golden one, and the nominee–whoever that is–should use it!
