The emerging conventional wisdom has it that the Democrats can't win in 2008 simply by being "reflexively anti-Bush." But I wonder if an equal or greater danger isn't being "reflexively pro-Clinton." I know well that this isn't an issue at Daily Kos, but it pretty clearly remains the case in the party's primary electorate at large.
Consider some findings from the latest LA Times/Bloomberg poll. They show a generic 8-point Democratic advantage in the presidential race next year--but the clear Democratic front-runner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, loses to all three leading Republican candidates (40-45 to McCain, 41-43 to Romney, 39-49 to Giuliani). John Edwards outpolls two of them (41-45 McCain, 46-32 Romney, 46-43 Giuliani), and Barack Obama defeats all three (47-35 McCain, 50-34 Romney, 46-41 Giuliani).
At the same time, though, Sen. Clinton leads among all Democratic primary voters with 33 percent to Obama's 22, 15 for Al Gore, and 8 for Edwards. Clinton also commands the support of 40 percent of self-identified "liberal Democrats" (Obama is second with 21 percent), and 47 percent of women (Obama 26). Another poll shows Clinton leading Obama among African-American voters, 41 percent to 35 percent.
I think it's the support of "liberal Democrats" that most surprises and bothers me. As most of us here would agree, Hillary Clinton isn't in any sense a liberal Democrat, and thus doesn't have any of the positives associated with that political breed... but she does have all the related negatives. I agree with Sam Rosenfeld and Matt Yglesias, who wrote earlier this year that:
Clinton's national reputation as a liberal is pervasive, and it means that even beyond her apparently genuine centrism, she's uniquely hamstrung in staking out any boldly liberal stances on a major issue. At the same time, her national reputation as a liberal is so firmly entrenched that she will likely find it extremely difficult to broaden her appeal to the electorate. There's been too little polling on the subject, but a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that asked whether Clinton is a liberal or a moderate, conducted in May 2005 (near the height of her conservative positioning phase), had 54 percent of respondents classifying her as a liberal, and just 30 percent as a moderate. Years of adopting conservative issue positions, meanwhile, have not brought her back to the heights of personal popularity she enjoyed during the late 1990s -- popularity that seems intrinsically tied to the ups and downs of her marriage rather than to her conduct in office. Her unfavorability ratings remain significant, and they have barely budged from the mid-40s during her entire Senate tenure. No Democratic candidate would enter a general election facing a lower, and firmer, ceiling of public support than Hillary Clinton.
Liberal Democrats should want a nominee who is, in fact, a liberal. And liberals and moderates alike have should want a nominee who's seen as a moderate by the median voter. Clinton, however, is a moderate who people think is a liberal. This is a terrible combination of qualities from almost every point of view -- except, perhaps, for the faction of her advisers whose views are probably too right-wing to be associated with the Democratic presidential nominee, unless they can latch onto the one candidate both blessed and cursed with an undeserved reputation for liberalism.
I'd always assumed that the misperception of Clinton as a liberal existed mostly on the right and in the center. But the LA Times data suggests that it's present among Democrats as well. That's troubling, and suggests that Obama and Edwards have their work cut out for them in chopping down Hillary Clinton's liberal "credentials."
Of course, the other piece of conventional wisdom is that their doing so could help her in a general election. But that presupposes that independents and moderate Republicans are open to being convinced that the woman they've detested for the better part of 20 years isn't who they thought she was. I guess Richard Nixon pulled off that trick 40 years ago, but obviously neither the media culture nor the partisan machinery back then were anything like what they are today.
What neither Obama nor Edwards probably can do much about is the overwhelming female support among Democrats for the first really viable female presidential candidate. But a caveat noted at PoliticalWire from a different poll is that "In the general election, 43% of female independents said they 'definitely will not vote for her if she is the Democratic nominee.'"
That's not female Republicans; that's female independents. And remember that Hillary Clinton consistently polls more strongly among women than men--this held strong in the internals for all three of the head-to-head matchups polled by the LAT--so it's possible, maybe likely, that a majority of independent men won't support her under any circumstances. Given that the Republicans start with a larger "base" than Democrats in terms of ideology (though not party identification), writing off such a big chunk of the contested middle--especially against a perceived moderate like Giuliani, if he somehow makes it to the general--probably would doom the ticket.
For all the useful insights of this poll, however, it still fails to ask the question I'm most curious about: how badly Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee would hurt Democrats further down the ticket.
I very strongly believe that nominating Sen. Clinton will absolutely doom the party's majority in the House of Representatives, and possibly endanger the Senate as well. Freshman Democrats in "red" states like Indiana and Kansas, and even "purple" states like New Hampshire and Iowa and Ohio, likely would have to disavow their own presidential candidate; their Republican challengers would start with the enormous advantage of 16 years of anti-Hillary stereotyping in the minds of the local electorate.
I'm not saying she couldn't win anyway. I'm actually pretty sure she would beat Mitt Romney; her team is obviously exceptional at the blocking and tackling of politics, and a Mormon candidate could have some of the same categorical opposition as Clinton herself. That same advantage might help her against McCain, Thompson or Giuliani, and the current finding that she barely outpolls Rudy among women would be destroyed once Team Clinton put out the word about how Rudy crapped on his second wife.
But the larger point is that the 2008 election, presidential and congressional both, is the Democrats' to lose--and it seems to me the best chance they have to lose it is by nominating Hillary Clinton for the presidency.