Jon Chait has a nice piece in the LA Times that echoes the points I've made about Hillary's overrated 2000 victory in New York:
The real reason Clinton will lose is more prosaic: Obama is a far better politician.
Republicans have long had a kind of black-magic fear of the Clintons' political potency. From the right's perspective, Bill Clinton won the presidency at a time when the GOP thought it had an electoral college lock. Then he beat back the Republican revolution and the party's efforts to defeat him.
The reality is less dramatic. Bill Clinton defeated a recession-weakened president with some help from a third-party spoiler, stopped the GOP from cutting highly popular social programs, won reelection during an economic boom and rallied his own party to thwart a wildly partisan impeachment crusade. None of these triumphs required unusual political skill.
Hillary Clinton has tried to piggyback on her husband's ferocious reputation, boasting that she "beat the Republican attack machine." Of course, if anybody beat the Republican attack machine, it was Bill. Hillary Clinton wasn't on any ballot in the 1990s. True, her reputation was at stake, but that's a fight she lost: She ended that decade a highly unpopular figure. She remains one today, with about half of the public persistently telling pollsters they have an unfavorable view of her.
Nor was Clinton able to shed her baggage when she moved to New York. In her November 2000 Senate race, she ran five points behind Democratic ticket-topper Al Gore in New York, and Gore himself was hardly a beloved figure at the time. Six years later, she pummeled a token opponent.
One point Chait doesn't note: Hillary's numbers only improved in the aftermath of the Lewinsky affair, which made her seem like a more sympathetic figure. But by 2000 they reverted to her previous, highly polarizing profile.
The point about Bill Clinton's overrated political skill is also worth considering (Ezra Klein had a good post on this in the last month or two but I can't find the link right now). Bill is obviously a very good politician, but his political achievements are relatively underwhelming in retrospect and he's been an ineffective surrogate for Hillary in this cycle.
Even worse, Hillary has lately run a very polarizing campaign dividing Democrats from Democrats.
The last several weeks her team has engaged in a fight not just against Obama but the voters who've come out for him and the people in the states he's won. I don't see how that can be a winning strategy. Should she win the nomination, she's already conceded at least a dozen states to the Republicans and she'll spend precious months trying to win back Obama's voters for her run against McCain.
Posted by: Jinchi | March 04, 2008 at 01:35 PM