Is Hillary already toast?
February 9, 2006
Don't get me wrong: I always thought she was going nowhere. But this is embarrassing. And, frankly, not necessarily the best thing for the GOP, either. More on that later. First, let's review.
A few weeks ago, word came out, in the form of a poll result from Rasmussen, that a full 51% claimed they would most likely not vote for a candidate Hillary for president. Now, it's awfully early for anyone to be anywhere near the middle on that, let alone OVER it, but then again, Hillary does come to the party with extraordinary name recognition. About the best thing a Hillarite could tell himself in consolation would be that, maybe, it was a statistical anomaly. One poll could be a blip, after all -- maybe people had other things on their minds when the pollster called.
But now comes the followup poll from Mr. Rasmussen. And guess what -- Hillary has lost ground. Lots of it. Says the Rasmussen site:
Among Democrats, the number who would definitely vote for Clinton dropped 11 percentage points over the past two weeks.
The person who 59% think will be the Dem candidate now polls 43% who will "definitely" vote against, up from 39% 2 weeks earlier. Also, it seems that Hillary's effort to re-brand herself as a moderate isn't working too well. Says Rasmussen, 45% consider her liberal. 33% call her 'moderate', and to 33%, she probably is. MoveOn.org and Kos do get a lot of traffic, after all, and that probably explains the 9% who think she is conservative. That's pretty good, too, since that 9% are the noisy, angry people who will run someone to her left, bleeding off support that she can't spare. These numbers are essentially unchanged in 2 weeks.
Hillary hasn't really had a very moderate couple of weeks. She voted against judge Alito, and for the filibuster. It had to be an especially tough call on the latter -- piss off the irate base and risk being tied to any future conservative decisions Alito may make, or, well, blow that 'moderate' thing she is trying to sell by siding with the liberal half of her own party. It was a tough call for a wannabe president for whom image is everything. But regardless of whether the other way would have gone better, this was not a good result. The case could be made that a 'Sister Souljah moment' wouldn't have done her any worse, and then she'd actually have a moderate bona fide to flaunt. But she stayed true to herself, and kept to the hard left. Who's surprised?
Okay. That summarizes the what. And, truthfully, it's hard to call it bad news for conservatives. But I was kind of hoping she would make a better early showing than this. You see, the quicker the left figures out that she's unelectable, the sooner they can start pumping up an opponent who might actually have a prayer. Any money that they send to her is money that won't be going to whoever the candidate actually ends up being.
On the plus side, the Dem stable is pretty low on electable candidates. John Kerry still thinks HE has a chance. That's why he organized the filibuster that snagged Hillary. Edwards still looks like a fetus, and now he's a former one-term senator. Richardson is as tied to the Clinton administration as Hillary is. There are people like Vilsack and Warner, but nobody any normal person has heard of. And, of course, there is that biggest problem for any Dem candidate, the hard place to the rock that is the GWOT: the angry left. Nobody for the war on terror will get past them, and nobody against will get past the general election. Here's hoping they don't figure it out and wise up. There is still almost a year, after all.
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