How do you know that Team Hillary is definitely planning a run for 2008? When James Carville starts writing Op-Eds that make the threadbare case that she can be elected.
Carville's case is essentially this: Hillary got elected in 2000 to the Senate despite objections from the naysayers; some of her polling numbers are not catastrophic; she has a net positive rating of 54%-42%; having been through the right-wing slime treatment for over a decade, nothing they can say, supposedly, will stick; and besides, those people who like her really, really like her.
Wake up, James (if I may call you that). It ain't so.
Hillary got elected in 2000 because of four factors: her willingness to work very hard for it, her own glamour as First Lady, her luck in having a weak opponent, and because New York is a blue state, at the time a blue state still angry over impeachment. For a sitting First Lady, especially this one, to get elected against a completely unknown junior Congressman in this state is not illustrative of anything. Whatever naysayers there were, not that I can really recall any, were at best marginal; after all, Rangel and Moynihan recruited her.
With regard to her polling numbers, show me one poll that shows a majority of the electorate willing to vote for her. Just one. No, polls from your own outfit, Democracy Corps, don't count. Then, I'll show you a whole series of polls that show a majority saying they wouldn't vote for her if her opponent was Satan incarnate.
The right-wing slime treatment (Carville throws in a deft jab at Kerry, saying that "One thing we know about Clinton campaigns: Nobody gets Swift Boated". Ouch.) cuts both ways. They made Howard Dean, a gun-toting country doctor for crying out loud, look like a less sane version of Che Guevara. The difference between, say, Mark Warner and Hillary is that with her, they have a head start dating to 1991. And let's face it, Hillary is a really broad and inviting target. Sorry.
Lastly, with regard to her supposed support: take it from a New Yorker, Hillary's support is tepid. Parts of the Democratic Party are in open revolt against her, throwing their support behind what has got to be the most laughable statewide candidate I have ever seen, Jonathan Tasini; he is so bad that he makes Andrew Cuomo look likable and competent. Yes, it is that bad, and still, he gets some support. Now imagine that Eliot Spitzer were running against her in the primary.
Of course, Hillary is going to crush whomever the other side nominates; but that is in large part due, again, to the fact that New York is a blue state, and that her republican opponents are more laughable even than Jonathan Tasini. One, whom even the New York Post labels "Kooky K.T.", is currently in the news with a very public fight against her own father, whom she accuses of physical abuse (and for having let her gay brother die of Aids without having the basic decency of making a visit); the other, John Spencer, is a right-wing nutcase most notable for screwing, promoting and then marrying his secretary.
Nor can a credible argument be made, just to pre-empt that, that a strong showing by the junior Senator in supposedly red areas upstate is a signpost that leads the way to carrying Arkansas and Ohio. Simply put, upstate New York is not South Dakota. It is a region that has suffered an inexorable decline while under republican government. The state of New York is going to vote against the status quo this year, which upstate means voting against republicans; this paradoxically will benefit Hillary to some extent, along with the unprecedented popularity of Eliot Spitzer. The comparison with Ohio or any other state is simply not valid, because of the special circumstances that obtain in this state.
Carville makes an interesting case that Hillary could rally women and Hispanics to the Democratic standard; that's where the meat of his case is. The thing is, though, that Hillary is at best in the middle field in terms of overall and presumably also female support. Anything that Hillary can do, John Edwards, Wesley Clark or Mark Warner can do better, it seems. It is simply not the case that voters will vote for someone overwhelmingly because they happen to share a gender or other trait with the candidate.
So please, James, rejoin the reality-based community. There is too much on the line in 2008 to run Hillary. Besides, we're about to rehire her for another six years, and New Yorkers expect her to do her job; which, by and large, she does quite well. By contrast, to quote Talleyrand, a Hillary Presidential candidacy would be worse than a crime: it would be a mistake. Let's not make it.
