JVL: Just how bad is it for Hillary?

For a better read, view this email in your browser. Mar. 18, 2015 No. 163 By Jonathan V. Last COLD OPEN Is Hillary toast? Last week the New York Times and the Washington Post ran dueling stories about Hillary Clinton. On Wednesday, the Post talked to a large group of Democrats and concluded, “Some top Democrats are alarmed about Clinton’s readiness for a campaign.” Twenty-four hours later, the Times sampled a group of Democratic elites and reported, “Democrats see no choice but Hillary.” Now these two sentiments aren’t entirely contradictory, but they’re pretty close. Liberals in the media have started to openly request a primary challenge. Eugene Robinson is now making the case that Hillary must be hiding something bad, and Obama superfan David Remnick is saying that it’s essential to have someone step forward to battle Clinton in the primaries. (Remnick is so smitten that he concludes his column by suggesting that by October 2016 voters will be wishing Obama were still on the ballot. Just for a reality check, the president’s approve/disapprove numbers are 45/50, and it’s been a good couple weeks for him.) Now rest assured, the minute Hillary Clinton cinches the nomination, every single one of these people will get out their trench shovels and start digging in to defend her on anything and everything, including the emails they currently find so troublesome. (By then it will be “old news,” and if the media has taught us anything, it’s that the passage of time somehow creates an absolute value sign around the misdeeds of people from certain protected classes.) But the question remains: Will she get there? I remain of two—or actually three—minds on the subject. On the first count, I’ve never been 100 percent certain she runs. Ninety percent, sure. Maybe even 95 percent. But it doesn’t seem impossible to me that she looks around over the next month and realizes that while most people only profit by running for president, regardless of the outcome, she has everything to lose if she runs and doesn’t wind up in the White House. Right now she’s the most admired figure in Democratic politics, even though people have misgivings. If she runs and loses, she’ll be the party’s goat, and people will remember her as a scheming, selfish plutocrat who endangered the progressive gains of the Obama years for the sake of her own vanity. On the second count, I think that if she does run, Clinton is more vulnerable than people realize. If you look at Democratic polling numbers, Clinton has a 45-point lead over the next theoretical challenger. But that’s a mirage. Clinton has nearly 100-percent name-ID and has been a presumptive candidate for at least two years. Yet on her best days, only 60 percent of Democrats are saying that they’d vote for her even when she has no rival. If (or when) a credible challenger jumps in, Clinton will not start the race with a 45-point advantage. I suspect that within few weeks, the numbers will be closer to 50-to-35. She might have a 20- or even a 25-point lead. But her challenger will be within hailing distance. And remember Barnes’s Second Law of Politics: All races tighten. In a general election match-up, Clinton is already down to a single-digit lead against Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Scott Walker—and even Rick Perry! Against just about any likely Republican opponent, Clinton will be older, less energetic, and, objectively speaking, in possession of less political talent. She’s beatable. Enormously so. But then there’s that third count . . . We’ll talk about it below. LOOKING BACK “It is the afternoon of the Arizona primary, and James Carville is talking on the phone in his office on Capitol Hill. Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his belt unbuckled, Carville is leaning back in his chair with his running shoes on the desk while a friend brings him up to date on the latest exit poll numbers from Phoenix. As Carville listens to the news, grinning and grunting into the receiver, his two dogs, Cavalier King Charles spaniels, explore the corner of the room. The dogs find an unidentified piece of paper—a memo from the president? a tax return?—and quickly reduce it to confetti. Carville looks up calmly. ‘Stop that,’ he says, but it's obvious he doesn't really mean it, and the dogs chew happily on. Their owner smiles and goes back to his conversation. James Carville is contented.” —Tucker Carlson, "James Carville, Populist Plutocrat" from our March 18, 1996, issue. Remember you get full access to THE WEEKLY STANDARD archive when you subscribe.   See Scott Run McCormack on Walker.   Dionne is Wrong Steve Hayes explains.   THE READING LIST John McWhorter on what "white privilege" is really about. * * * Santiago Calatrava’s World Trade Center subway disaster. * * * David Pryce-Jones on Pangloss's Europe. INSTANT CLASSIC “In one sense, the approach the president is said to be contemplating does fit into a pattern of his use of executive power. That pattern involves taking provocative executive actions on sensitive, divisive issues to isolate people he detests, knowing it will invite a sharp response, and then using the response to scare his own base voters into thinking they are under assault when in fact they are on the offensive. That’s how moving to compel nuns to buy contraception and abortive drugs for their employees became ‘they’re trying to take away your birth control.’ This strategy needlessly divides the country and brings out the worst instincts of people on all sides, but it has obvious benefits for the administration and its allies. Liberals get both the substantive action and the political benefit of calling their opponents radicals and getting their supporters worked up. Obama’s legalization of millions would surely draw a response that could then be depicted as evidence of Republican hostility to immigrants, rather than of Republican hostility to illegal executive overreach that tries to make highly significant policy changes outside the bounds of our constitutional order.” —Yuval Levin's prescient analysis of Obama's executive amnesty, July 29, 2014. THE LAST WORD Okay, so here’s the truth: I still think Hillary Clinton is a formidable political commodity. Very much so. In his excellent weekly newsletter, the G-File, Jonah Goldberg has a fantastic riff on what it must have been like among the old Clinton hands as the email scandal broke: One of my favorite movie clichés is the bit where the old pros — and maybe one eager rookie — get together for one last job. . . . [T]he ChappaDataQuitIt or E-PotDome story (okay, we’re still looking for a better nickname) reminds me of those kinds of movies. The silent whistle has been blown. The sleepers activated. The old timers have been notified. I like to imagine Lanny Davis right in the middle of a meeting with an African dictator when, suddenly, his assistant hands him a note. All it reads is “Cankles Is Down.” Lanny abruptly terminates the meeting, pushes back a briefcase full of krugerrands, and races to some hellish Third World airport, telling his aide, “Let the Redskins know they’re on their own. The Clintons need me.” Flash to a canoe on the banks of the bayou. James Carville has just caught a catfish with his bare hands and proceeds to tear apart the wriggling fish, Gollum-like. He eats the entrails first. Then, suddenly, a flare goes off above the tree line. That’s the signal. He throws the bulk of the carcass into the river, where gators churn the water to grab it now that the apex predator has departed. He makes his way to the shoulder of a dirt road where a limousine is waiting to get him to an MSNBC studio as fast as possible. His suit and tie, neatly pressed, are waiting for him along with as many hot towels as he may need to remove the fish viscera. David Brock slinks out of his leather onesie and races to his command center, bustling with Dorito-dust frosted 20-somethings at computer terminals. “This is a level-one-alpha scenario. Cancel all leave. Turn off all X-boxes . . .” Sidney Blumenthal, consciously dressed like that French guy in The Matrix, leaves his table-for-one, and heads home to sacrifice some creatures to Baal in preparation. They’re all coming home. I love the idea of that montage; it’s perfect. Goldberg goes from there to suggest that there’s something telling about the fact that when Hillary needed defending over the last couple weeks, it was the longtime loyalists who were sent into action: It suggests that if Clinton becomes president, this is what we can expect to see. Her bubble is that thick and her paranoia that powerful. Surely this can’t be an attractive prospect to voters. Yet I wonder what the downstream effects of Obamaism will be on the electorate. Because if you’re an independent voter, which is worse? The scandal of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which is clearly an act of rule-breaking, but for a quotidian political purpose? Or Barack Obama issuing an executive order to amnesty millions of illegal immigrants—which is “legal” except for the fact that it’s a radical redefinition of executive powers which cuts against pretty much the entire theory and history of American governance? Which is worse? Hillary lying about being under sniper fire in Bosnia? Or President Obama pushing through a colossal healthcare reform bill that no one on his own side actually read or understood, without a single Republican vote and then using the nuclear option of reconciliation to pass it? Which, again, was perfectly “legal” in the strictest sense. Or President Obama pitching nuclear woo at the mullahs in Iran while coldly dismissing the Israeli head of state—which wasn’t in violation of any actual “rules”? You see where I’m going here: It could be that voters will look at Clinton’s wrongdoings and decide that they pale in comparison to the perfectly proper doings of the Obama administration, which have been vastly unpopular for most of his presidency. After experiencing Obama’s scandal-free administration—which just happened to include the weaponization of the IRS, a racialist-activist Justice Department, the mushrooming growth of ISIS, James Taylor diplomacy, and an all-out assault on the principle of religious freedom, just to pick from a few highlights—voters may look at the Clintons and decide that a slippery, Nixonian politician who looks at the poll numbers and tries to follow popular sentiment is an attractive proposition. The real attractiveness of the Clintons in 2016 isn’t that they promise a return to 1990s-style economic growth. It’s that they promise a return to politics driven in large part by a calculated study of public sentiment. They can promise a politics that would do welfare reform, but would have abandoned Obamacare after Scott Brown was elected to the Senate in 2010. In other words, they can promise poll-driven cynicism rather than ideological warfare against the American political system. In a way, I wonder if that’s not what’s driving Clinton’s best poll numbers. A few weeks ago, the Boss had a great editorial on “A Fire Bell in the Night.” A recent poll asked voters whether politicians represented “the future” or “the past.” All of the Republicans presented were upside down, with more respondents saying “past” than “future.” (Jeb Bush’s numbers were 64-to-33. Yikes.) Hillary Clinton has been part of the national public scene since 1991. A voter who is 24 years old today has literally never known an America without Hillary as part of political life. Yet she came out 50 percent “the future” and only 48 percent “the past.” Which is why, despite everything, I remain convinced that if she does run, Hillary Clinton is a highly formidable figure. Best, Jonathan V. Last P.S. To unsubscribe, click here. I won't take it personally. MORE FROM THE WEEKLY STANDARD The Party of the Furrowed Brow A Bill Kristol editorial. Read more…   Why GOP ‘Insiders’ Thwart Conservatives It’s the political structure, stupid. Read more…   Walker Camp Whacks Jeb On ending affirmative action in Florida. Read more…     Online Store Squeeze the head to the left to relieve stress. Yes you can! Only at our store.     Subscribe Today Get the magazine that The Economist has called "a wry observer of the American scene."   Read probing editorials and unconventional analysis from political writers with a dose of political humor at weeklystandard.com. To unsubscribe, click here.