GordonUnleashed

Hating Hillary Won’t Be Enough

November 26th, 2007 by Steve

It was a sweltering late spring evening in the District of Columbia. I was tipping back drinks and chatting with Reason’s Dave Weigel about the presidential race. I don’t remember the specific event, as we were at several drink-tipping political events per month around that time of this year.

We both agreed about two primary issues that evening. Time has proven us both wrong about one and both right about the other.

We both underestimated the Ron Paul campaign, at that time. We came at it from different perspectives, but I certainly didn’t expect it to have advanced as far as it has now. Based on his comments that evening, he didn’t, either.

Both of us also stated that the general GOP card would likely be to run strongly against anything Hillary, especially since the Republican Party had nothing “positive” on which to run anymore. Dave just put that portion of our conversation to the printed page. Here’s a preview:

Keeping Hillary out of the White House is literally the only motivation some conservatives have to pull the Republican lever in 2008, especially if their party nominates a pro-choice candidate for the first time since 1976. “Just enough people might go to the polls next November nursing one conviction that trumps all others,” Terence Jeffrey wrote a few weeks after the panel (which he also appeared on). “There’s no way they would vote for Hillary Clinton.” Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard executive editor and a sturdy weathervane for Republican popular opinion, expressed the same thing in a late-September column: “Nearly all Republicans, plus a lot of independents, rally around the need to defeat Senator Hillary Clinton and keep her away from the presidency. So it follows, not entirely logically, that they wish for her to win the Democratic nomination.”

Is this wishful thinking from a party and a movement on the ropes? Not according to pollsters. There are voters who have given up on the GOP over the last few years and utterly loathe the Clintons in general or Hillary in particular. Americans are aching to vote Democratic, and polls that test a generic Republican candidate against a generic Democrat give Clinton’s party a double-digit lead. But their enthusiasm flags when they ponder the flesh-and-blood Democratic frontrunner. Pollster Scott Rasmussen points out that at least 45 percent of Americans don’t like Clinton personally. She simply rubs them the wrong way—in every way. Despite that generic lead, she only ties or narrowly outpaces Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain.

For the most part, Ron Paul has has been focusing on issues and leaving the character assassination of Hillary to the other GOP candidates. One wonders if Paul has outflanked the key political players, the pundits and the armchair quarterbacks again.

Posted in Bad Democrats, Bad Republicans, Ron Paul, National Politics

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