Hillary’s Worst Enemy
Is Hillary, according to Michael Goodwin. He notes the recent polls that find Hillary Clinton to be perceived as less trustworthy than most of the other candidates in the field today. Those poll results, Goodwin says, are directly the fault of the candidate. Hillary being Hillary may not be working out too well.
Indeed, one of the mysteries of the Democratic race so far is why she fell into a predictable trap. She and her team, including the former President, are addicted to polls the way some people are addicted to crack. They had to see the red flags on basic character questions, yet they did nothing to confront them. And so Hillary has been Hillary, to a fault.
Now she is starting to pay the price. Winning the nomination, which seemed inevitable for nearly a year, is becoming a serious challenge. Suddenly, she looks neither invincible nor inevitable.
Polls that show Sen. Barack Obama picking up support at her expense in Iowa, New Hampshire and nationally perfectly illustrate Clinton's weakness. Asked which candidate is most honest and trustworthy, Clinton came in fourth in New Hampshire and third in Iowa. Only 13% rated her tops in that category in New Hampshire, with Obama getting 27% and both John Edwards and Bill Richardson doing better than her. In Iowa, Clinton got only 15% on the same question.
In both states, Obama gained ground she lost. He now leads for the first time in Iowa, 30% to her 26%, according to the ABC/Washington Post survey, with Edwards at 22%. And her 23-point lead in New Hampshire shrunk by 9 points in a month, according to the CNN/WMUR survey, which put her ahead by 36%-22% over Obama.
Given her relative strength across the board, the results hardly qualify as a great unraveling, but neither are they incidental. Less than a month after Obama and Edwards began making more direct attacks on her candor, cracks began showing. That's not a very long time under the gun to suffer such damage and the quick results will only encourage more attacks.
As Goodwin points out, the cracks in Hillary's wall of inevitability began to appear very shortly after Obama and Edwards began going on offense against her. Those attacks have been neither particularly tough or particularly venomous as political attacks go. Yet they have caused damage because they are targeted where Clinton is weakest: her trustworthiness. Even if she wins the nomination, the damage has already been done.
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Blue Crab Boulevard » Reversal Of Fortunes? — Monday, 26 November , 2007 @ 12:10 pm
By martian, Sunday, 25 November , 2007 @ 12:51 pm
The damage has already been done with the Democratic Primary voters. Republicans should take note of everything that worked against her in the primaries so they can use it against her if/when she gets the nomination. That way they can target the same type of attacks against her credibility toward the undecideds in the general election.
By feeblemind, Sunday, 25 November , 2007 @ 5:10 pm
HRC is the most untrustworthy candidate among the dems, yet she still enjoys the most support. Hmmmm…. what does that say about dem voters? Victory uber alles?
By feeblemind, Monday, 26 November , 2007 @ 7:11 am
Interesting article at WaPo titled ‘How Big Man in McAllen bundles big for Clinton’. Sounds a lot like the Chinatown donations.
By martian, Monday, 26 November , 2007 @ 12:56 pm
feeb, that’s exactly what it says about Dem voters! Think about it. What was the outraged cry during the (Bill) Clinton impeacment? The outcry was that “he’s only lying about sex!”. The underlying theme here is that it’s OKAY to lie to the American people, it’s even OKAY to commit perjury and lie in a court of law - if you’re a Democrat and, especially, if you’re a Democrat named “Clinton”!