Well, that was quick: Hillary Clinton is no longer inevitable.
The media giveth and the media taketh away. And so the consensus that she will be sworn in as president in January 2017 has begun to crumble.
All right, I’m exaggerating a bit. More than two years before the Iowa caucuses, normal people haven’t even tuned in. And many in the press undoubtedly believe that Clinton will be facing off against Chris Christie, who as expected won a huge reelection victory yesterday. (For junkies: a network exit poll had her beating Christie in New Jersey, 49 to 43 percent.)
I’ve always had problems with the whole Hillary inevitability scenario, having seen that evaporate in 2008. But the conventional wisdom in the press seemed set in cement, notwithstanding the fact that Clinton hasn’t said she’s running.
Now comes liberal New York Times columnist Frank Bruni to say that, gadzooks, she’s slipping in the polls. An NBC/Wall Street Journal survey found that Clinton’s favorability rating had slipped from 56 to 46 percent, while her unfavorable rose from 29 to 33 percent. Stop the presses!
“Here we go. The beginning of the end of her inevitability...
“Voters are souring on familiar political operators, especially those in, or associated with, Washington. That’s why Clinton has fallen. She’s lumped together with President Obama, with congressional leaders, with the whole reviled lot of them.”
That’s an excellent and underappreciated point.
“And some of the ways in which she stands out from the lot aren’t flattering. She comes with a more tangled political history of gifts bestowed, favors owed, ironclad allegiances and ancient feuds than almost any possible competitor does…
“And what would the argument for a Hillary presidency be? Something interesting happens when you ask Democrats why her in 2016. They say that it’s time for a woman, that she’ll raise oodles of dough, that other potentially strong candidates won’t dare take her on. The answers are about the process more than the person or any vision she has for the country. There’s no poetry in them. That’s not good.”
