A defiant Hillary Clinton claimed in her web message announcing her presidential bid that she knows how to beat the Republicans. They may be much easier to beat than Hillary. A CNN poll in 2005 was more a public referendum on voter perception of her than a poll. Far more voters even at the risk of being reviled for gender bigotry said they were "more likely" to cast a vote against Hillary than for her. In exit polls on election night last November following her smash Senate reelection victory, one out of five New York voters were adamant that Hillary would not make a good president. And these were the voters that backed her in her Senate victory.
Their distaste for Hillary as President has nothing to do with her being a woman, or the too liberal tag hard line conservatives routinely plaster on her. More than 90 percent of Americans in some polls now claim they'll vote for a woman for president, and she's worked mightily during her Senate stint to shed the too liberal image, and that includes backing big ticket legislation with GOP lawmakers.
The brutal truth is that Hillary is a living, breathing wedge issue. With Hillary as the Democratic presidential standard bearer, the Democrats will almost certainly be 170 electoral votes in the hole before the first vote is cast. That's the number of votes that the Democrats can kiss good-bye in the South and several Border States.
Bush, as all Republican presidents since Nixon, either swept or got a near sweep of the South. Though some conservative Republicans jumped Bush's ship in the midterm elections and voted for Democrats, the majority still backed Republicans. They will likely jump back to the Republicans in 2008 with Hillary as candidate. That would make it virtually impossible for the Democrats to pry the crucial one, let alone, two states away from the Southern Republican bloc.
The loss of that big a swath of electoral votes going in the presidential election door can be dumped squarely on the deep and resonant hate Bill residue that still taints her. The instant she and hubby set foot in the White House she became every bit the target of hard line conservatives that Bill was. When she compared her advocacy battles to Eleanor Roosevelt's that set off even louder warning bells among them. The comparison was not entirely a stretch. Hillary and Eleanor were the two First Ladies' that profoundly influenced their husbands on crucial public policy issues.
That further insured that the Republicans eight-year vendetta against them would be unprecedented in the annals of American politics. They pounded not just Bill but Hillary with the Whitewater and Lewinsky scandals, and blasted her for micromanaging Clinton initiatives on health care, women's choice, and civil rights. When Hillary hit back and branded the hate Clintons campaign as a vast right wing conspiracy, that sent the Hillary bashers into paroxysms of rage. Though the impeachment drive against Bill eventually crashed and burned, her political activism marked her as someone capable of stepping out of Bill's shadow and carving out her own political path. That made her even more of a juicy target if the day ever came that she decided to make her bid for the presidency.
That day is coming and the sentiment hasn't changed. The weeks before last November's mid-term elections, evangelical pied piper Jerry Fallwell lathered her with the devil image. That was a calculated slap. He knew the name Hillary might be the one name that could send conservative evangelicals scurrying to the barricades to beat back the Democrats onslaught. It didn't work. One third of white evangelicals broke ranks and voted for the Democrats in the mid-terms. But that does not mean that they have made peace with the Democrats, let alone feel any more benevolent toward Hillary. She still stirs their passions, and Fallwell and company will rouse those passions even more in an effort to get the evangelical defectors back into the fold in 2008.
In a national race she'll go head to head with the GOP's biggest gun. Polls show that in a one to one contest with former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Arizona Senator John McCain, Hillary trailed badly. In one poll, a near majority of respondents gave her little chance to win. Only the two failed Democratic presidential candidates, Al Gore and John Kerry, and the long out of power, even more polarizing, Newt Gingrich got higher negatives as potential presidential candidates. And while the woman as president bias appears dead in the polls, Republicans, seniors and conservatives are still more likely to oppose a woman as president than other groups.
The Democrats are convinced that they are within striking distance of grabbing the White House, and Hillary and Barack Obama are the best, or at least the best known, and the brightest stars that they have right now. But they also need someone who can win. That someone is not Hillary. The baggage is simply piled to high.