A new Washington Post/ABC News poll reveals that Hillary Clinton has a 61 point lead over the next closest potential Democratic nominee for the 2016 presidential contest. While things can always happen in politics, if Hillary is in fact running for president and wins the nomination, expect the GOP - especially the Christofascists and conspiracy theorists to go utterly berserk. The downside, of course, is that if she runs and the GOP does nothing but attempts at character assignation and bashing, the likelihood is increased that many women will defect from whoever the GOP nominee may be out of disgust over the woman bashing and what may come to look like an insane anti-Hillary obsession. First some details from the Washington Post on the poll findings:
Hillary Rodham Clinton's 61-point edge over Joe Biden in new Washington Post-ABC News polling makes her the single biggest frontrunner for a Democratic presidential nomination in the history of the poll, an affirmation of the conventional wisdom that the nomination is hers for the taking.
Clinton stands at an eye-popping 73 percent in a hypothetical 2016 primary race with Biden, the sitting vice president, who is the only other candidate in double digits at 12 percent. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has signed a letter along with a handful of other Democratic senators urging Clinton to run, is at 8 percent. And that's it.
On its face, these numbers are a massive boon for Clinton -- indicative of her status as the unquestioned and, at this point, unchallenged frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. It also proves a point we -- and many others -- have been making for quite some time now: Clinton is a much larger favorite to be the nominee at this point in the 2016 process than she was at this same time (or ever) in the 2008 contest. And, while the hypothetical 2008 matchup showed three candidates -- Obama, Edwards and Gore -- with real followings immune from Clinton's frontrunner status, there is no one out there in 2016 that can make the same claim.
If you are looking for a dark cloud in these numbers -- and, to be honest, you really have to look -- it's that Clinton has nowhere to go but down. Assuming some candidate -- Howard Dean? Martin O'Malley? -- decides to damn the torpedoes and challenge her, it's hard to imagine that Clinton wins every primary by 60 points (although she could). Given that the prospect of a serious challenge seems, at this point, laughable, any sort of decent showing by a challenger to Clinton will receive wall-to-wall coverage -- "Is it deja vu all over again for Hillary????" and so on and so forth -- that makes the race look a lot closer than it actually is.
And whom do the Republicans have? Their centrists are pedestrian, Pawlenty-style Midwesterners with little of the personality and star power that a presidential campaign demands. I mean: Walker? Kasich? They’re solid governors, but … it’s hard to see them in the White House. The base faves – a Ted Cruz or a Rand Paul – could get the nomination pretty quickly, given the new primary calendar and rules. But it would be very hard to frame a race between Clinton and, say, Cruz, as anything but a Johnson-Goldwater moment.
[T]here's an impulse when it comes to Hillary Clinton that presents a real danger for Republicans. There are so many things they hate about her and her husband that they barely know where to start. And that hatred could well be their undoing.
Even after all this time, and after the Clinton impeachment turned out to be such a disaster for them, so many conservatives still can't wrap their heads around the idea that other Americans don't think about that episode in the same way they do. For them, it's a tale of crime and injustice, the injustice being the fact that Bill Clinton got away with it. It goes right to the heart of what they hated so much about him. It wasn't that they had policy differences with him, though they did. What angered them so much about Bill Clinton was that he was better at politics than they were.
[M]ost Americans don't have the same reaction. First of all, they aren't that angry about it anymore. It was a decade and a half ago. And second, their memories of the whole sordid affair are as much about Republicans going too far—an impeachment that never should have happened, Ken Starr's salacious and obsessive pursuit of Clinton, an opposition party that grew more desperate and deranged the clearer it became that they'd never take down their white whale—as they are about the President's misdeeds.
As for Hillary, well as far as they're concerned she's complicit in everything Bill did, and then you can add to that the contempt they have for her as a powerful woman. You just cannot overestimate the degree to which Hillary Clinton brings out the ugliest misogynistic feelings and sexual insecurities in so many people (not all of them conservatives, I would add). This is something I've written about before, and I'm sure I'll be writing about it again, because it's going to be a central part of any campaign in which she's involved.
There are few things more fundamental to smart political strategy than the understanding that other people may not share your beliefs, and may not have the same emotional reactions you do to certain people and events. That understanding is what allows you to make thoughtful decisions about how to persuade the number of people you need to achieve your political goals, whether it's passing a piece of legislation or winning an election. This is something Republicans often struggle with, but when it comes to the Clintons, they're absolutely blinded by hate.
[T]he more they talk about it, the more voters will become convinced that they've taken leave of their senses. And that, more than anything else, may be what gives Hillary Clinton such a good chance of winning in 2016. When they're looking at her, her opponents just can't see straight.
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