In an interview with Newsweek.com, Sean Wilentz makes the case for Hillary Clinton. I'm sympathetic to his criticism of Barack Obama's anti-political tendencies, but his response to a question about Hillary's electability is weak:
You know who makes that argument more than anybody else? Republicans. This is a favorite Republican argument. They say, "We want to run against Hillary. She's the polarizing candidate and we're going to take advantage of that. She's going to rile up our base, et cetera, et cetera." Whenever Republicans tell us who they want us to nominate, we should nominate her. They're scared of her. Who else is going to build a coalition?
Saying Republicans are "scared of her" is such a silly claim. Every campaign says it is being attacked because the other side is scared -- John McCain's campaign manager just claimed "CNN is scared that John McCain will beat Hillary Clinton" -- and there's usually no way to resolve the question. More importantly, the evidence suggests that the GOP shouldn't be scared of Hillary. So why would we think otherwise?
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