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Politics & Media
Nov 19, 2014, 06:09AM

Pundits Don't Like Hillary Clinton

Everybody else does though.

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Hillary Clinton is boring, uninspiring and a relic of the 1990s. She voted for the Iraq war, too rich and too cautious. "In general, young people don’t have the same passion for Hillary that they had for Obama. Neither do African Americans. Neither do many liberals," Peter Beinart declared at the Atlantic, summing up much of conventional punditry. The chair of the RNC, Reince Priebus, even confirmed Democrat's worst fears when he declared, “If your job was to unify the party and raise a ton of money and get a ton of volunteers on the ground, I promise you, you would want no other opponent to run against than Hillary Clinton.”

I can't predict whether or not Clinton will win the 2016 Presidential election. But it's pretty clear that the hand-wringing and/or gloating about Hillary's weaknesses are misguided.

First, suggesting that Hillary can't provoke enthusiasm is a willful exercise in selective memory. Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008 with an inspired campaign that generated massive turnout among key constituencies like the young and African-American voters. But even so, Clinton was hardly crushed. Both candidates received somewhere around 18 million votes—more than any other primary candidate from either party in history. After the fact, it's always easy to blame losers for losing. But compared to just about any candidate in history who was not Obama, Clinton ran a hugely successful campaign, and was very popular with the Democratic electorate. Lots of voters turned out for her once. There's no guarantee they'll do so again, of course, but if her wealth, shilly-shallying, or association with the 90s didn't stop voters before, it's reasonable to think that it won't stop them in 2016 either.

If Clinton's popularity had cratered since 2008, or if she’d been involved in a career-threatening scandal, then you wouldn't want to look to 2008 as a precedent. But she hasn't been involved in a scandal (no Benghazi doesn't count) and her popularity has, if anything, been boosted by her tenure as Secretary of State. Her numbers have dropped a bit recently, but she still has a very respectable 54 percent favorability rating overall, and a 90 percent favorability rating among Democrats according to Gallup.

The idea that a large number of Democratic voters are put off by Hillary Clinton, or won't vote for her, is a fantasy. Democrats love Clinton. If you’re a Democrat and (like me) aren’t keen on Clinton, then you’re an outlier, and probably shouldn't use your own feelings as a gauge as to how well she's likely to do in the nomination process.

Clinton's popularity is likely to dip as Republicans attack her and everybody sorts themselves into partisan boxes for the election. But the fact is, Clinton has been in the public spotlight for decades now. Not only is she quite popular, she's relatively safe. The chances that a Jeremiah Wright will be dragged out by opposition researchers is low. The recent effort to tar her as rich, for example, is just feeble. This is Hillary Clinton. She was First Lady; she's from one of the most powerful political families in the country. Everybody knows that. Voters are going to be put off because they suddenly realize she's really wealthy and powerful? Come on. People know what they're getting when they get Clinton. And most of them—and an overwhelming number of Democrats—like her.

There’s every reason to think that Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and that she has as good a chance as anyone of defeating the Republicans in 2016, if she has a bit of luck and the economy continues on an upward trend. Why, then, all the pundit concern-trolling?

I suspect it's nothing personal. Newspaper writers and pundits want something exciting to happen. Clinton is old news; everybody knows about her. That doesn't give writers much to work with. They'd much rather have someone new and exciting—who has to struggle to get the nomination, rather than someone who just waltzes in with no drama. Reporters and political writers have every reason to be bored with and resentful of Hillary Clinton. There's no sign that the electorate shares their biases, though.

—Follow Noah Berlatsky on Twitter: @hoodedu

Discussion
  • The average person does not really care about Hillary Clinton. They don't dislike her but she's not exciting. If she runs, she won't have the novelty factor of Obama, even though she could be the first female President. Unless the GOP nominates a total moron (likely), I don't think she has a chance in hell.

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  • Hillary Clinton's tenure at SecState, being Obama's lackey, won't help her in the Dem primaries. If Jim Webb gets in, he'd eat for lunch.

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  • Show me the poll where Jim Webb has 90% favorability among Democrats, and we'll talk. Otherwise, what I'm hearing, Russ, is that you wouldn't vote for her — but I really doubt that your preferences (or mine) have much to do with the average democrat, who likes both Obama and Hillary a lot more than you do.

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  • Hillary is a HAWK. She'll have trouble with her base when people start paying attention to the 2016 election. Until then, polls are merely a name recognition meter.

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  • I'd vote for an Uber driver over Clinton (unless she ran against Cruz), but that's neither here nor there. Of course Webb doesn't have a high favorability rating: he's not well-known. I don't particularly care for the self-righteous Webb either, but my point is that the 2016 race hasn't started in earnest. And the midterms scrambled the playing field. Whether that's to the advantage of the GOP or Democrats, we don't know yet.

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  • I think you're kidding yourself Russ. Favorability is a rating of whether people *who have heard of you* like you. Being unknown is another matter (though also a problem for Webb.) But...the idea that the midterms shook up the 2016 race is silliness; the race is pretty much exactly where it was before, except that now we know Scott Walker is a viable candidate. And the 2016 race has absolutely started in earnest. Hillary is shoring up her position as the front runner as we speak, and has been doing so roughly since 2012. Webb's best, and perhaps only, chance at the moment is if Hillary has some sort of serious health problem. Otherwise, he doesn't have a much better chance of being the Democratic nominee than I do.

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  • Noah, the real silliness is that you've already anointed HRC as the nominee, well over a year before the primaries begin. In '91, GHW Bush had a 91% approval rating; that's why no "big" Dem like Cuomo ran, and let Bill Clinton sneak in. As for the midterms, yes, Walker won in WI, so now he'll be a candidate. But also, Kasich won by 31 points in Ohio (polls wrong again) and he's in. And 2015 promises to be a tumultuous political year, as Obama's immigration speech showed last night. If you go by polls right after the midterms, I assume you thought Hillary had the '08 nomination locked up at this time in '06.

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  • I'd rather see Elizabeth Warren eat her for lunch.

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  • I'm skeptical of that version of Clinton's success...but anyway, Clinton is I think at the moment the single most dominant party candidate in recorded history, if you exclude sitting presidents. Denying that is just wishful thinking. Warren and Webb are simply not credible challengers, and it's hard to think of anyone who would be. Does that mean she'll necessarily win? No; she could have a serious health scare or (much, much less likely) some sort of catastrophic scandal in her past could make party actors abandon her. Right now, though, she is massively popular with both Democrats and Democratic interest groups, including the folks who control all the money. That's just the way it is. I'd rather Warren won too, but I don't see any reason to fool myself into thinking that that's anything but an extremely remote possibility.

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  • You said nothing new. You've resigned yourself to Clinton's nomination, and that's it. And Al Gore in 2000 wasn't a dominant candidate? Point is, again, for whatever reason, you're calling this way too early. 2015 isn't the primary year: a lot can, and probably will, happen.

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  • Al Gore was a dominant candidate...and he won the nomination without all that much trouble. I would have preferred Bill Bradley, and he did better than I expect Hillary's challengers to do, but he was never all that close to winning.// You're not saying anything new either. What evidence do you have that any of the challengers named have any particular chance to beat Clinton? What actual polling evidence, or signals from party actors, can you point to to suggest that she's vulnerable? There's nothing there, except that you don't like her and want there to be more of a story. Again, she could get sick, and that would matter, but short of that, it's pretty clear she's going to win.//Things are very different on the Republican side, of course. I don't really have any idea who's going to get the nomination there, because there are a number of strong candidates and no one has shown signs of consolidating party support. Whoever wins, though, will have a perfectly good chance of beating Clinton — who will in turn have a perfectly good chance of winning herself.

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  • Noah, I don't give a shit if Hillary's the nominee. If the GOP nominates a rational candidate, it'll be a 50-50 election. What you can't get through your skull is that it's too early to assume HRC is the candidate. Why is that so hard to understand?

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  • Russ, thank you for the much needed break. I shall resume my Quixote like quest against the circular non-logic of Noah after the holiday. With much gratitude and amusement, Texan

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