One of Senator Clinton's campaign's favorite talking points is how "battle tested" she is against the Right. She has stood toe to toe against the VRWC, Clintonites claim, and has emerged victorious. Tom Schaller, writing for The American Prospect's excellent blog TAPPED, notes that this is simply untrue.
Follow me over the flip to see why.
HRC's first, and only, attempt to take on the Right on a substantive issue was health care in 1993-1994. Can anyone possibly claim that the Right did not eat her lunch during that fight? Since that crushing defeat, HRC has avoided battling the Right on any issue of substance. Rather, her whole career since then has been one of either joining with them, as she did on the "crucial" issue of violence in computer games, or just keeping quiet. In short, HRC has never beaten the Right on any substantive issue.
Literally, her only success against the Right are two underwhelming election wins to the office of Senator from New York. Yes, in 2000 she beat Rick Lazio, an unqualified light-weight whose campaign imploded, by the margin of something like 55-45. Notably, Clinton ran almost ten percentage points behind Gore's margin in New York. And yes, in 2006 she did win again, and by a substantial margin, in an election that the Right essentially gave her a pass. Still, I want to be fair. There is little question that if Clinton gets the Democratic Presidential nomination, she will beat the tar out of the Republicans in New York.
Perhaps a Clinton supporter will say that she deserves credit for some of the political "success" that Bill had. This seems plausible since she will follow his lead and run in the general election as a DLC Democrat. Indeed, Bill's political experience presents an excellent harbinger of what will happen to the Democrats if HRC is nominated. Bill Clinton was, demonstrably, the worse head of a political party since Herbert Hoover. When Bill was elected, the Democrats had an overwhelming congressional majority. The Clintons proceeded to lose that majority in only two years. Moreover, under the Clintons' political leadership, the Democrats lost three straight Congressional elections, a feat that had not happened in over 70 years. True, Bill did win reelection in 1996. Yet, he did so by adopting much of the Republicans' so-called "Contract With America." Even then, running against one of the weakest Republican presidential nominees in memory, Clinton still won less then 50% of the vote. In short, the Clintons did not so much prevail over the Right in 1996, but acquiesced to it for their own political benefit.
Finally, some Clintonites will no doubt fall back on their favorite method of argument: quoting polling results showing that she is ahead of the leading Republican candidates. Of course, they will not mention that almost every poll shows her the weakest of the three major Democratic candidates when matched up against their potential Republican opponents. And that's fine. Senator Clinton's supporters can certainly argue that these poll results show that HRC will beat the Republicans in the future. What they can not do is argue convincingly that either she or her husband has a history of beating the Right Wing in the past.