The Myth of Hillary the Inevitable Her big money has had its intended effect: scaring off any serious challenger.By William McGurn
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-myth-of-hillary-the-inevitable-1445899775
So now Hillary Clinton is invincible.
Such is the new received wisdom. It replaces the old received wisdom that she was a fatally flawed candidate sowing despair among Democratic Party bigwigs.
The new wisdom comes after a good two weeks that began with Mrs. Clinton trouncing her rivals in the televised Democratic debate and ended with her besting her Republican inquisitors on the House Benghazi Committee. In between, Joe Biden announced he would not be making good on his dying son’s request to keep the White House from the Clintons after all.
For all this, the idea that Hillary is unstoppable is nuts. Not least because her victories are less about defeating opponents than making sure the serious ones are removed before the contest has begun.
Start with the money. Back in the spring we learned that Mrs. Clinton and her outside supporters were aiming to raise $2.5 billion for her campaign even as she decried the role of money in politics. To put that $2.5 billion in perspective, it’s more than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent combined in 2012.
Certainly this money will be an advantage in next year’s race. But it has already done what it was really designed to do: scare off serious challengers for the Democratic nomination.
No surprise, then, that her actual rivals would come down to a socialist from Vermont (Sen. Bernie Sanders), a failed former mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland (Martin O’Malley), an ex-Republican, ex-governor and ex-senator from Rhode Island passionate about the metric system (Lincoln Chafee) and a former Democratic senator (Virginia’s Jim Webb) who only now seems to realize that the voters he was counting on are no longer in the Democratic Party.
No serious rival meant no serious debate. Thus Mrs. Clinton’s chief opponent, Mr. Sanders, not only refused to play the strongest card against Mrs. Clinton—her ethics—he exonerated her on behalf of the party before a nationally televised audience. Now he is reaping his reward, as Mrs. Clinton denounces him as a “sexist” for the way he attacked her on her anti-gun policy in the debate.
How different all this is from the Democratic primaries of 2008. Then, as now, Mrs. Clinton had planned a coronation. Then, as now, she had most of the advantages thought decisive: money, big-name endorsements, etc. Yet Barack Obama beat her anyway.
Mrs. Clinton’s record is a reminder that she is neither as fatally flawed as she was presented a couple of months ago nor as unbeatable as she may now appear. The truth is closer to what Mr. Obama, then the junior senator from Illinois, faced in 2008: an imposing candidate with at least three key weaknesses the GOP would do well to exploit.
First, and unlike in 2008, Hillary 2.0 has moved sharply left, to the point where she is now the candidate of a third Obama term. This will work well in Democratic primaries but will be a harder sell in the general campaign, where she will be tagged with every Obama failure, from the rise of Islamic State to the record number of Americans out of work.
Consider her assault on Bernie Sanders. In 2008, Mr. Obama deftly avoided playing the race card even as he benefited from it. By contrast, Mrs. Clinton has now made gender her signature credential. But it may not play the way she clearly expects: In April, the conservative political action committee American Crossroads released a survey reporting that eight out of 10 voters in battleground states say that Mrs. Clinton’s pitch to become the first woman president “makes no difference” to their support or opposition.
Second, Republicans don’t have to prove that Hillary Clinton is not to be trusted. Polls confirm the American people already know that. The challenge for a GOP nominee is to connect this fact—that Mrs. Clinton’s default mode is to deceive—with what this would mean if she became president.
Finally, as the former Obama adviser David Axelrod pointed out in his memoirs, Mrs. Clinton has two huge flaws: She’s polarizing and is a candidate of the past. In 2008 the Obama campaign attacked her in ads noting her coziness with Wall Street and accusing her of the “same old politics of phony charges and false attacks.”
Alas, rather than coldly analyzing and exploiting her weaknesses, as Messrs. Obama and Axelrod did in 2008, too many Republicans have been hoping for some fateful intervention such as a federal indictment. It’s wishful thinking: If there is one thing we know about the Clintons, it’s that where others might give up, they just keep moving.
Better to keep in mind that Mrs. Clinton has had only two victories at the ballot box, both in blue-state New York against GOP lightweights: former House member Rick Lazio in 2000 and former Yonkers Mayor John Spencer in 2006.
The only time Hillary Clinton ever faced a serious candidate—Barack Obama—she lost.
Write to mcgurn@wsj.com.
Comments are closed.
