That inevitability thing.
Two of American politics' most embarrassing figures -- Dick Morris and Susan Estrich -- have Hillary Clinton books coming out, which is only right since it's been at least a couple of months since the last My Obsession with Hillary book (Ed Klein's) came out. Matt Yglesias links to an interview Dick Morris had with The Corner's Katherine Lopez on his new book Hillary vs. Condi: The Next Great Presidential Race. Morris' take is so typically bogus, it makes you wonder why National Review embarrasses itself with this stuff (I guess just for kicks).
For the record, Condoleeza Rice has shown no signs of planning to run for president, unless you count her endless flat denials as signs. She isn't leading in any of the polls of Republican primary voters and has inspired no notable activism on the right wing blogs. Morris offers no reason in the world to believe she could beat John McCain in a primary, other than the fact that John McCain once lost South Carolina to Bush. Morris gets the latest Fox poll numbers on the Democrats wrong. He actually argues that HRC having passed 22 bills in five years is a poor showing for a freshman senator and that "this is hardly the record New Yorkers expected when they elected her" (how many New Yorkers honestly give a shit?). And, finally, his claim that HRC will win the 2008 election against any Republican except Condi Rice by sweeping white females -- like she did when she "carried women in New York by more than 20 points" in 2000 -- ignores the fact that her margin among New York women was only half that of Al Gore (he's a white male), according to Amy Sullivan (I can't check Morris' numbers directly). As Sullivan, a big HRC sympathiser, goes on to point out, if HRC were to repeat that performance nationally in 2008, she'd get creamed.
On the other hand, I think Morris might be right, and Yglesias wrong, about Hillary Clinton's inevitability in winning the Democratic nomination if she decides to run for it. Yglesias challenges the Morris-Estrich-punditocracy view that HRC can't be stopped:
Admittedly she's polling strongly now, but people haven't focused on the candidates or the issues. She faces what seems to me will emerge as an insurmountable obstacle in a high-profile debate -- the war in Iraq. Neither her retrospective view of the war (great idea!) nor her forward-looking vision (keep fighting!) are supported by more than a small handful of Democrats. It seems to me that all a rival is going to need to do to beat her is point these facts out.
The problem is that it's not going to be terribly easy to point these facts out. Whoever does so is going to have to need some credibility as a war opponent -- Kerry, Edwards, Biden, Bayh are all going to look like disgusting opportunists for trying to paint HRC as a warmonger when they're all on record, many recently, praising the decision to take out Saddam Hussein. Nor can I see Clinton-friend Wes Clark making the accusation in a way that's harsh enough to sway voters from her candidacy toward his "purer" one (particularly since he's the guy that oversaw the bombing of the Serbs, hardly a pacifists' dream candidate). But the problem is bigger than Wes: any male politician who overtly attacks America's leading female liberal as a warmonger is playing a very dangerous game, with the Democratic primary voters and the press.
There's also the polling matter. It's easy to dismiss polls, but HRC's lead isn't just signficant; it is, as Morris says even while he gets the actual numbers wrong, pretty much insurmountable -- at least insurmountable without either a massive screwup on HRC's part or the sort of negative camapaign I'm betting John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Wes Clark aren't willing to wage against her. The numbers bounce around for the Republican field and the secondary Democrats in most of the early polls, but HRC holds around 40% of Democratic support in almost all of them. My favourite pollster right now is Strategic Vision. Their newest New Jersey Poll (in addition to showing Corzine back up by 6% -- whew!) also has HRC leading with 42% among New Jersey Dems, just like the Fox poll. No other Democrat breaks 10%.
Pundits like to assert that early polls don't matter because voters aren't paying attention and will snap out of their automatic attraction to the Clinton name when the primary rolls around and the accusations start flying. They point to Howard Dean's tanking in the national polls after Iowa as a sign of how meaningless the national polls are as predictors. Maybe so, but Dean never polled above 31% of Democrats nationally, even at his peak toward the end of December 2003. He only rarely broke 25% in national polls. And the 2004 primary race had no well-known frontrunner; Dean was an unknown quantity. According to Harris, between 10 and 16 December, 2003, he had only 76% name recognition among Democrats and Dem-leaners nationally, leading most of his rivals in this category but trailing Joe Lieberman. Dems still had much to learn about Dean and, when they did, they didn't much like it.
This is not true of HRC. As Chris Bowers pointed out on Tuesday, she and the three Dems behind directly her all have very high name recognition. But it's not just a question of positive name recognition. Left-leaning voters seem to have bought the spin that HRC's time has come. Four years ago, for instance, HRC has the same level of name recognition but was not the Dem-leaning electorate's first choice for the 2004 nomination. In the early polling for 2004, she languished around 15-20% -- just slightly above where John Kerry and John Edwards are now -- behind the frontrunner, Al Gore. Pundits like to point to this too as evidence that polls mean nothing, since Kerry scored around 5% in those 2001-2002 polls.
Fine. I'm willing to grant that if there's another terrorist attack; if Bush's approval ratings skyrocket to 91%; if the press goes into a thank-god-Hillary-Clinton-isn't-president tissy; and if she uses her role as de facto head of the Mommy Party to (admirably but suicidally) talk about the need for patience and pluralism rather than to run to the bloody right as the Dems' chief Big Hawk, then she won't be the 2008 nominee. To make a big understatement, Gore had very bad luck. Hillary Clinton isn't likely to face the same symbolic or pratical problems -- and the scandal mill has had years to produce something truly damning about her and has not. Hillary Clinton looks clean.
Finally, even if HRC hits a snag that lowers her numbers -- a new scandal, heavy media scrutiny of her support for the war and other positions potentially unappealing to primary voters -- there's no guarantee that pointing out how Hil is too hawkish (or too prudish) is really going to swing a critical number of voters away from her. Dem primary voters are generally more cautious and predictable in their voting behaviour than the activists on the blogs make them look. While the GOP has picked a few "reformers" -- Reagan on the right and Bush II in the squishy New-Dem center (hah!) -- Dems, since the 1972 debacle, have routinely picked their consensus candidate. Bill Clinton was only a very minor exception; he ran to the left of Tsongas and the right of Harkin and was a New South neoliberal at a time when New South neoliberalism was waxing. And Kerry was the ultimate example of this pattern: a nod to the left (he's a liberal! don't vote Nader!); a demonstration of respect for the military and the war on terror mixed with a healthy historical skepticism of war; and a reward of sorts to a long-serving, reliable Democrat who'd made the VP shortlist of the last two nominees. For better or worse, Kerry epitomized the Democratic Party in 2004.
Hillary Clinton is much the same. She fits every media bigfoot stereotype of what a Dem needs to be to win: domestically liberal, values-and-culture-concious, pro-democracy-promotion abroad. Hollywood likes her and can supply her with all the glamour she needs. And frankly -- going by history -- if it looks like a plausible, unobjectionable winner, the primary electorate will choose it. They don't need to love it. All HRC partisans have to do is point out that if an anti-War Dem (and the choices are essentially Russ Feingold and Wes Clark, unless we get a stealth Carl Levin candidacy) wins the primary, he faces eight months of fending off accusations that he thinks 2000+ kids died in vain in the Iraqi desert and that he hates the military and that his party is unpatriotic. It will take a very big play for the primary voting heart to stop voters from being skeptical about such a candidate's chances.
I still think HRC will not in fact run for the Democratic nomination in 2008, making for a more open, interesting contest. But if she does run, I'm guessing the nomination is hers. The general election, on the other hand, is a different ballgame entirely.
For the record, Condoleeza Rice has shown no signs of planning to run for president, unless you count her endless flat denials as signs. She isn't leading in any of the polls of Republican primary voters and has inspired no notable activism on the right wing blogs. Morris offers no reason in the world to believe she could beat John McCain in a primary, other than the fact that John McCain once lost South Carolina to Bush. Morris gets the latest Fox poll numbers on the Democrats wrong. He actually argues that HRC having passed 22 bills in five years is a poor showing for a freshman senator and that "this is hardly the record New Yorkers expected when they elected her" (how many New Yorkers honestly give a shit?). And, finally, his claim that HRC will win the 2008 election against any Republican except Condi Rice by sweeping white females -- like she did when she "carried women in New York by more than 20 points" in 2000 -- ignores the fact that her margin among New York women was only half that of Al Gore (he's a white male), according to Amy Sullivan (I can't check Morris' numbers directly). As Sullivan, a big HRC sympathiser, goes on to point out, if HRC were to repeat that performance nationally in 2008, she'd get creamed.
On the other hand, I think Morris might be right, and Yglesias wrong, about Hillary Clinton's inevitability in winning the Democratic nomination if she decides to run for it. Yglesias challenges the Morris-Estrich-punditocracy view that HRC can't be stopped:
Admittedly she's polling strongly now, but people haven't focused on the candidates or the issues. She faces what seems to me will emerge as an insurmountable obstacle in a high-profile debate -- the war in Iraq. Neither her retrospective view of the war (great idea!) nor her forward-looking vision (keep fighting!) are supported by more than a small handful of Democrats. It seems to me that all a rival is going to need to do to beat her is point these facts out.
The problem is that it's not going to be terribly easy to point these facts out. Whoever does so is going to have to need some credibility as a war opponent -- Kerry, Edwards, Biden, Bayh are all going to look like disgusting opportunists for trying to paint HRC as a warmonger when they're all on record, many recently, praising the decision to take out Saddam Hussein. Nor can I see Clinton-friend Wes Clark making the accusation in a way that's harsh enough to sway voters from her candidacy toward his "purer" one (particularly since he's the guy that oversaw the bombing of the Serbs, hardly a pacifists' dream candidate). But the problem is bigger than Wes: any male politician who overtly attacks America's leading female liberal as a warmonger is playing a very dangerous game, with the Democratic primary voters and the press.
There's also the polling matter. It's easy to dismiss polls, but HRC's lead isn't just signficant; it is, as Morris says even while he gets the actual numbers wrong, pretty much insurmountable -- at least insurmountable without either a massive screwup on HRC's part or the sort of negative camapaign I'm betting John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh and Wes Clark aren't willing to wage against her. The numbers bounce around for the Republican field and the secondary Democrats in most of the early polls, but HRC holds around 40% of Democratic support in almost all of them. My favourite pollster right now is Strategic Vision. Their newest New Jersey Poll (in addition to showing Corzine back up by 6% -- whew!) also has HRC leading with 42% among New Jersey Dems, just like the Fox poll. No other Democrat breaks 10%.
Pundits like to assert that early polls don't matter because voters aren't paying attention and will snap out of their automatic attraction to the Clinton name when the primary rolls around and the accusations start flying. They point to Howard Dean's tanking in the national polls after Iowa as a sign of how meaningless the national polls are as predictors. Maybe so, but Dean never polled above 31% of Democrats nationally, even at his peak toward the end of December 2003. He only rarely broke 25% in national polls. And the 2004 primary race had no well-known frontrunner; Dean was an unknown quantity. According to Harris, between 10 and 16 December, 2003, he had only 76% name recognition among Democrats and Dem-leaners nationally, leading most of his rivals in this category but trailing Joe Lieberman. Dems still had much to learn about Dean and, when they did, they didn't much like it.
This is not true of HRC. As Chris Bowers pointed out on Tuesday, she and the three Dems behind directly her all have very high name recognition. But it's not just a question of positive name recognition. Left-leaning voters seem to have bought the spin that HRC's time has come. Four years ago, for instance, HRC has the same level of name recognition but was not the Dem-leaning electorate's first choice for the 2004 nomination. In the early polling for 2004, she languished around 15-20% -- just slightly above where John Kerry and John Edwards are now -- behind the frontrunner, Al Gore. Pundits like to point to this too as evidence that polls mean nothing, since Kerry scored around 5% in those 2001-2002 polls.
Fine. I'm willing to grant that if there's another terrorist attack; if Bush's approval ratings skyrocket to 91%; if the press goes into a thank-god-Hillary-Clinton-isn't-president tissy; and if she uses her role as de facto head of the Mommy Party to (admirably but suicidally) talk about the need for patience and pluralism rather than to run to the bloody right as the Dems' chief Big Hawk, then she won't be the 2008 nominee. To make a big understatement, Gore had very bad luck. Hillary Clinton isn't likely to face the same symbolic or pratical problems -- and the scandal mill has had years to produce something truly damning about her and has not. Hillary Clinton looks clean.
Finally, even if HRC hits a snag that lowers her numbers -- a new scandal, heavy media scrutiny of her support for the war and other positions potentially unappealing to primary voters -- there's no guarantee that pointing out how Hil is too hawkish (or too prudish) is really going to swing a critical number of voters away from her. Dem primary voters are generally more cautious and predictable in their voting behaviour than the activists on the blogs make them look. While the GOP has picked a few "reformers" -- Reagan on the right and Bush II in the squishy New-Dem center (hah!) -- Dems, since the 1972 debacle, have routinely picked their consensus candidate. Bill Clinton was only a very minor exception; he ran to the left of Tsongas and the right of Harkin and was a New South neoliberal at a time when New South neoliberalism was waxing. And Kerry was the ultimate example of this pattern: a nod to the left (he's a liberal! don't vote Nader!); a demonstration of respect for the military and the war on terror mixed with a healthy historical skepticism of war; and a reward of sorts to a long-serving, reliable Democrat who'd made the VP shortlist of the last two nominees. For better or worse, Kerry epitomized the Democratic Party in 2004.
Hillary Clinton is much the same. She fits every media bigfoot stereotype of what a Dem needs to be to win: domestically liberal, values-and-culture-concious, pro-democracy-promotion abroad. Hollywood likes her and can supply her with all the glamour she needs. And frankly -- going by history -- if it looks like a plausible, unobjectionable winner, the primary electorate will choose it. They don't need to love it. All HRC partisans have to do is point out that if an anti-War Dem (and the choices are essentially Russ Feingold and Wes Clark, unless we get a stealth Carl Levin candidacy) wins the primary, he faces eight months of fending off accusations that he thinks 2000+ kids died in vain in the Iraqi desert and that he hates the military and that his party is unpatriotic. It will take a very big play for the primary voting heart to stop voters from being skeptical about such a candidate's chances.
I still think HRC will not in fact run for the Democratic nomination in 2008, making for a more open, interesting contest. But if she does run, I'm guessing the nomination is hers. The general election, on the other hand, is a different ballgame entirely.
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