As the dust settles from this week's Democratic Presidential Debate, the accepted theme seems to be that Hillary Clinton had her worst performance (perhaps her only bad performance) of any of the debates so far but that she revealed a major weakness that the other campaigns will now try to exploit. I certainly agree with that.
There is uncertainty about whether John Edwards was slightly too agressive and risked offending Hillary supporters and Iowa caucus goers, or whether he demonstrated a trial lawyerly precision that Democrats will want in their nominee to be used against the Republicans. There is uncertainty about whether Barack Obama tried too hard to "be nice" and was too soft in his criticisms of Hillary to be the beneficiary of her inevitable fall, or whether he is perfectly positioned to benefit if Hillary falls and voters are offended by Edwards' agressiveness. We will presumably see the results in the polls over the next few weeks and a tweaking by the candidates of their presentations in the next debate (scheduled for November 15).
I think Hillary Clinton's problem still stems from the fears about her electability, but her vulnerability ties to the perception that she more then any of the other candidates is shifting her positions for political reasons. To me the reality has been that Hillary Clinton has been struggling from the outset (and by this I mean since being elected to the Senate in 2000) with how to position herself as a centrist and a defense hawk for her ultimate general election campaign for the presidency. When the Iraq war started to go so badly, Hillary then knew that she had to shift to the left in order to secure the Democratic nomination. It sounds crass but I fully believe that every position that Hillary Clinton has taken since 2001 has been just this calculating. It doesn't mean she doesn't have core values but simply that there are no core values that she wouldn't adjust or compromise if she thought it was necessary to secure her election to the presidency. This is what I have always believed and disliked about Hillary Clinton and it is what John Edwards and Barack Obama finally exposed on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.
All through this campaign Hillary has attempted to delicately balance herself as close to Barack Obama on the left as she had to be in order to stall him and win the Presidential nomination while still maintaining the flexibility to pivot to the center for the general election. She has also tried throughout this campaign to be as vague as possible about specifics (whether it be health care plans, social security plans or intent for residual forces in Iraq) in order to allow her the flexibility to move as far to the center (or right) as she deemed necessary in the general election.
Tuesday night the mask came off as Hillary was exposed over and over refusing to be specific, giving vague non answers, and ultimately giving contradictory answers to the same question.
The problem for Hillary is two fold. 1) it is not an attractive position to be in in the Democratic primaries. Democratic voters generally want a candidate who can win in 2008 but also want someone who will stand for their values and fight against the Republicans on their behalf; 2) as Edwards and Obama and the media spend the next two months pounding on the image of Clinton as an equivocator and a double-talker, the theme of a Republican campaign against her will be set and her chances of winning a general election in 2008 (already marginal) will be further diminished.
Hillary is going to have to respond. In two weeks the debate will be sponsored by CNN and Wolfe Blitzer will certainly give Edwards and Obama (and Dodd and Biden) plenty of further opportunities to discuss Hillary's Iran vote and her shifting positions and her electability problems. Hillary's initial response to this week's debate seems to be a complaint that "all the men were piling on" and that it was unfair. That response may help her hold a part of her base (women) but ultimately it won't be enough. Her second response has been to attack the media and complain that Tim Russet unfairly focused all of the (negative) attention on her. That kind of whining is not going to help either.
Her current situation in Iowa and lead in New Hampshire is not strong enough to afford a 5 - 10 point drop in support. If any of the polling this week (her own internal or rassmussen's that we all can watch) show her dropping in that range she is going to have to react quickly.
Her alternative may be to come down from her pedestal of inevitability and counter-attack Obama and Edwards. But of course with negatives as high as hers, she may not be able to risk that either. It all comes back to her Un electability. Before this happened she was sitting right around 49-51 percent of the country vowing to vote against her no matter who the Republicans nominated. If that number goes up even a drop in the next two weeks she will become radioactive.
Somehow , despite her high unfavorables the vast majority of democrats still believed (at least until last week) that she was the most electable of the candidates. If she loses that edge, it will become a problem that will be almost unsolveable.
All the king's horses and all the king's men won't be able to recreate Hillary's inevitability theme.