There’s a thing people keep saying about Hillary Clinton that I don’t get.
(Let me preface this by saying the following: I think Hillary would be an acceptable-to-good President. I think the misogynistic attacks upon her are deplorable. And I have never understood Hillary-hatred – like, at all. It’s just weird.)
Here’s the thing I don’t get. Proponents of Hillary’s candidacy argue that she’s taken all the lumps the right wing attack machine can dish out and therefore she is “vetted” and knows how to fight back on those terms.
Now, I will freely admit that Hillary has managed to survive the constant attacks on her, and that isn’t nothing to be sure, but surviving isn’t the same as thriving. The constant attacks on Hillary have given her an incredibly weak public image. The most recent polling of hypothetical election matchups has Barack Obama pulling much stronger victories over every Republican candidate except John McCain (where it’s a razor-matchup for both him and Hillary), and the McCain numbers are within the margin of error anyway.
Now, I freely admit that it is entirely possible that, should Obama be nominated as the Democratic candidate, that the sleaze machine will ratchet up to 11 and knock his favorability numbers down. And I don’t think should Obama be nominated that his victory will be as totally assured as his current thirty-point margin of victory over Mitt Romney.
But here’s the thing: the worst-case scenario, in this regard, is that Obama’s negatives get as bad as Hillary’s. It’s really not possible for Obama’s numbers to get worse than hers in this regard. Hillary is a polarizing figure, and pretty much everybody has already made their mind up about her. This is fine, except that way too many people have made up their mind that they don’t like her.
(As an aside, I’d also point out that the reason major Democrats are lining up behind Obama is because they all know that a Hillary candidacy will actively work against many smaller Democratic campaigns and an Obama candidacy probably won’t. All of Hillary’s “experience” arguments are worth precisely dick if the House and Senate go Republican again.)
EDIT TO ADD: Somebody mentioned foreign policy in the comments and I wanted to mention something else: Hillary’s potential policy fuckups are larger than Obama’s potential policy fuckups, I think. A lot of people play the “experience” card as regards Hillary, and although I’m not sure how greatly we can treat her eight years as First Lady as “experience,” I also think it ain’t nothing.
That having been said, whatever experience Hillary possesses is almost entirely domestic and legislative, and the capacity of any President to act on the domestic front is curtailed somewhat by what Congress wants to do. A repeat of the Bush presidency with ruling party members acting in lockstep with the President is almost certainly not going to happen. (As Will Rogers once said, “No, I don’t belong to any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”) So the potential for Obama screwing up domestic policy worse than Hillary can (assuming she can) is, I would suggest, low.
However, on the foreign policy front, the President has far greater latitude to act, and Hillary has next to no foreign policy experience. Neither does Obama, so experience in this regard is mostly a wash – however, after experience comes intent, and Hillary’s foreign policy track record is poor and her stated intentions are even less encouraging.
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I think you underestimate the effects of racism when you calculate like that. Because I will tell you flat out: There are several percentage points of Americans who will say they will vote for Obama, but will not because he’s black. So if his negatives get to Hillary’s, he’s in worse shape.
Now, whether they *will* is a question, since there’s a relative limited amount of time to do it in, but I do not ever estimate the power of the Republican-MSM slime machine.
Well, I’d have to second that… then again, I think there’s also a degree of sexism that comes into play for Hillary as well. But I do think that people going “OMG Obama can bring us all together” are failing to realize that the Republicans that support him will likely pull out the instant that the GOP GroupThink takes place.
Remember, Kerry was riding high at this point in 2004 too, and look what happened to him thanks to 527s and the MSM. 🙁
The thing is that I trust Obama, and I trust Edwards. I really have no idea what Hillary would do if she were elected. She’s already voted to authorize one war (which Obama never supported and which Edwards has since apologized for), and she’s voted to classify a portion of Iran’s military as terrorists, which does nothing to decrease the chances of war with Iran.
So while I’d take her over any of the GOP candidates right now, I’d rather have Obama or Edwards in that office because I’m pretty sure neither of them would start another war. With Hillary, I just don’t know.
I will give Hillary this. She admits she voted to support the war, and to the best of my knowledge she hasn’t made excuses for why she did it aside from the general Democratic decrying of that little being lied to thing. As for domestic policy, it is true that the president’s hands are tied on a lot of the little things. It’s a side-effect of the necessary tiering of government in the US.
Bush showed he’s a ball-dropper on the domestic events that are part of the reason why the executive office EXISTS. Responsible presidents don’t leave twenty thousand people to rot in a wrecked city in THEIR OWN COUNTRY. I mean that is a fuckup of Shadowrun proportions, the sort of thing you wouldn’t be surprised to see sandwiched between the Supreme Court voting to allow corporations to maintain their own private armies and VITAS in the game history.
And no matter what anybody says, Bush could’ve had the navy/coast guard in there to get those people out within a day – all he had to do was make a few phone calls. And he didn’t. The NO city government fucked up. The LA state government fucked up. FEMA? FUCKED UP. The buck stopped on his desk. And he fucked it up. That was when, for me, the last bit of credibility of GW Bush and the GOP went down the shitter.
I don’t think Obama or Hillary Clinton would’ve fucked it up like that if the buck had stopped on their desk. Maybe it’s wishful thinking on my part, but I just… can’t see it happening. Maybe I don’t want to. I’ll vote for either of them.
Obama will more than hold his advantage in the debates against any opposition as well, whereas, say, Hillary v. Huckabee, Hillary will get razed.