www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0507.cannon.html
html&j=n In 1978, while covering California politics, I fou nd myself on election night at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, w hich was serving as a kind of election central. Waiting for the returns to come in, I was sitting in the lobby having a drink with my fatherwho, then as now, was the leading expert on Ronald Reagan. As if on cue, the former actor and ex-California governor came striding into the hotel. E ven then Reagan looked the part: wide-shouldered, flanked by a security detail, sporting his trademark blue serge suit, every black hair in plac e The only thing missing, I thought, was the Marine Corps Band. No one back east took Reagan nearly as seriously as he seemed to be takin g himself. Despite a devoted following among what were then known as Gol dwater Republicans, the Washington cognoscenti casually dismissed Reagan as too conservative, too old, a B-movie actor who once played second fi ddle to a chimpanzee. He thinks he's the next president of the United State s After a pause, he added, And he might be. I remember that vignette every time a political sage says authoritatively that Hillary Rodham Clinton will never be president.
This is a particularly entrenched bit of conventional wisdom, which seems to have metastasized into a kind of secret handshake. If you know Clint on can't be president, you're a member of the Washington in-crowd. If yo u don't, you're an outsider, some boob from the sticks of, I don't know, Sacramento or somewhere. You know the rap: She 's too liberal, too polarizing, a feminist too threatening to male voter s Too much baggage. Bizarrely, the party's insiders are goin g out of their way to tear down the credentials and prospects of one of their rare superstars. Conservative columnist Robert Novak ran into this phenomenon recently while speaking to eight local Democratic politician s in Los Angeles. Novak told them matter-of-factly that Hillary was the odds-on favorite to be their party's 2008 nomineeand that no one was in second place. Novak was surprised by their reaction: Not one was for Mrs . With some exceptions, the journalistic pack seems nearly as negative abou t Hillary Clinton's chances. I'm a charter member of an informal lunch g roup of writers who runs the gamut from conservative to liberal, and eac h month when we meet, Hillary's name arises. Around the table it goes: S he can't be elected in a general election; women don't think much of her marriageor her, fo r staying in it; Each month, I marshaled my arguments in favor of Hillary's candidacy, until finally I began sparing my friends the whole rap by just notingfor the minutes of the meeting, as it werethat I disa gree with them. Perhaps my lunch mates, those worried activist Democrats, and the majorit y of Washington pundits are correct. Conservatives (and liberals) would consider it heresy to compare Ronald R eagan and Hillary Clinton. He combined Main Street sensibilities and a soothing Middle America per sona with an uplifting vision of America's place in the world that earne d him a stunningly decisive victory in 1980and 60 percent of the vote wh en he ran for reelection four years later. Clinton is a more polari zing figure, in more polarized times. Yet Clinton, like Reagan, can lay claim to the passions of die-hard grassroots members of her party. With the exception of incumbents and vice presidents, no candidate since Reag an has had a hammerlock on his or her party's nomination this long befor e the election. And like Reagan, the charisma gap between her and any wo uld-be challengers in her own party is palpable. Of course, the question is not whether she can win the primary. Most Demo crats concede the primary is probably hers for the taking. I don't know how you beat her for the Democratic nomination, former Sen. She can't lose the primary, and she can't win the general election. always circling back to the same despairing fear of anot her four years in the political wilderness. Democrats have raised this k ind of defeatism to a high art. But it's time for Democrats to snap out of it and take a fresh look at the hand they've been dealt. Hillary Rodh am Clinton can win the general election no matter who the Republicans th row at her. Poll positioned The available data do not suggest she is unelectablethey suggest just the opposite. A Gallup poll done a week before Memorial Day showed Sen. True, her unfavorable number i s 39 percent, which is high enough for concernbut one that is nearly ide ntical to Bush's on the eve of his reelection. And the unfavorable ratin g registered by Republican contender Bill Frist was nearly as high as hi s favorable numbers, with 32 percent saying they'd never heard of him. Then there was this eye-opening question: If Hillary Rodham Clinton were to run for president in 2008, how likely w ould you be to vote for hervery likely, somewhat likely, not very likely , or not at all likely? Very likely 29% Somewhat likely 24 Not very likely 7 Not at all likely 40 No opinion 1 At the risk of laboring the point, 29 percent plus 24 percent adds up to a majority. They've been going at her with verbal tire irons, mac hetes, and sawed-off shotguns for 12 years now. Clinton's negatives are already figured into her ratings. What could she be accused of that she hasn't already confronted since she entered the public eye 14 years ago? Clinton today is in a position similar to Bush's at the beginning of 2004. Democrats hoped that more information about the president's you th would knock him down. But voters had already taken the president's pa st into account when they voted for him in 2000. In fact, as the spring of 2005 turned to sum mer there were yet another book and a matched spate of tabloid broadside s In the face of it all, Hillary appears, if anything, to be getting st ronger. Indeed, the more the right throws at her, the easier it is for h er to lump any criticism in with the darkest visions of the professional Clinton bashers. Let's also look deeper into that Gallup survey because the closer you loo k at it, the more formidable Sen. Thirty percent of the p oll's respondents consider Hillary a moderate, while 9 percent described her a conservative. Such perceptions are hardly set in stone, however, and senators' voting r ecords can come back to haunt them in the heat of a campaign as John Ker ry learned in 2004 and countless others have learned before him. It's no accident that the last sitting US senator elected president was John F Kennedy. Thus, Clinton's Senate voting record, and where it puts her on the ideological scale, is worth some additional scrutiny. The most comprehensive annual analysis of voting records is undertaken by my magazine, National Journal, which for 2004 used 24 votes on economic issues, 19 votes on social issues, and 17 foreign policy-related roll c alls to rate all 100 US senators. Its resulting ranking of John Kerry as the Senate's most liberal member (at least during 2003) was a gift fr om on high for the Bush campaign, and the Massachusetts senator spent th e better part of his campaign trying to explain away this vote or that. For 2004, Clinton's composite liberal score was 71 percentputting her roughly in the middle of the De mocratic caucus. While adhering to her party's liberal dogma on issues s uch as race, gun control, and judicial appointees, Hillary lists slightl y toward the center on economic issues, and even more so on national sec urity and foreign-policy issues. There's no telling at this point how th e war in Iraq will play in 2008, but one thing is certain: Sen. Clinton won't struggle the way Kerry did to reconcile a vote authorizing the war with one not authorizing the $87 billion to pay for it. Yet another piece of received Washington wisdom holds that the party coul d never nominate someone in 2008 who has supported the Iraq war. But history suggests that if Bush's mission in Iraq flounders, a polit ician as nimble as Clinton will have plenty of time to get out in front of any anti-war movement. If it succeeds, Hillary would have demonstrate d the kind of steadfastness demanded by the soccer moms turned security moms with whom Bush did so well ...
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