Why is Clinton the most hated woman in America?

IF NOT FOR TRUMP, IT WOULD BE HARD TO PICTURE HILLARY AS A PRESIDENTIAL FAVOURITE

Now the American public turns away from the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and rolls over, wearily, like an old elephant seal, to face next week’s Democratic meeting in Philadelphia. Even a Donald Trump fan would have to acknowledge, I think, that the RNC was bizarre. Its candidate has run against the party’s traditional leadership cadre, which he has humbled, even shamed. Familiar Republicans with a national profile were all but absent from the event. On stage they were replaced by a diverse, almost random sequence of Trump relatives and speakers energized by his promise to Make America Great Again, Because Right Now It Stinks And It’s Being Run By Treacherous Dunderheads.

I kid. But, as you watched the convention, you could not have helped being aware how many groups and tendencies share this core message. It is not just the immigration reformers and the white chauvinists: “America isn’t working out — for me” is the message of the protectionists, the identity-politics multiverse, even Bernie Sanders’ new-romantic socialists, whom Trump explicitly addressed with talk of bad trade deals and fat-cat betrayal. Even the American middle class isn’t too sure that America is working out, which is bound to look pretty funny 200 years from now. Or even 20. Or maybe two.

But: good news, Americans! You can go vote for Hillary Clinton. If ever there was a candidate representing continuity, it is this one. If you think the whole America thing is actually going pretty well, what prospect could be more attractive than a second President Clinton? Who would like anything more than a second Clinton Boom?

There is, alas, a joyless quality to the Clinton candidacy that even her mainstream liberal supporters acknowledge.

That’s not counting the hard-core, ultraliberal ones, who simply despise her: they are analogous to the young, hooliganish ideological conservatives who backed Ronald Reagan against Richard Nixon in 1968 and who lurked, bitter and unforgiving, in the background of Nixon’s presidency. (Hillary famously volunteered for Barry Goldwater in 1964; if she hadn’t gone to Wellesley, she might easily have ended up as one of those people.)

Sanders gave Clinton a gruelling campaign test that nobody would have believed 12 months ago. She ended up drawing 55 per cent of counted votes in Democratic primaries, a pretty feeble total in a two-person race with no incumbent. Sanders did not formally concede the nomination until June 16, which was even later (by nine days) than Clinton herself had done in 2008; it must be granted that Sanders was thought to be unusually truculent in this regard, but he has parlayed his success into considerable influence over the official Democratic platform and, of course, jockeyed Clinton into imitating his rhetoric.

On July 7, before the RNC got underway, the Princeton biology professor and polling analyst Sam Wang — think of him as Nate Silver for people who can’t stand Nate Silver — pointed out an unusual pattern in the state presidential polls. This was a suitable time to take stock, because the conventions jar the polling results; the polls actually become less informative in July and August than they are in the springtime.

At the time of Wang’s analysis, 2016 polls had been taken in 35 states. In all 35, the party that won in 2012 was still ahead. The last election may seem like it happened a million years ago, in a totally different America, with unbelievably different combatants — but Trump led in every one of the Mitt Romney states, and Clinton in all of Obama’s.

There were, however, more undecided voters than at the same juncture in 2012. The pattern suggests that many Republicans seem reluctant to commit to Trump, which is no secret. He had a very thin edge in states Romney had won handily — Kansas, Missouri, Arizona. What the analysis also showed, however, is that Clinton had the same problem, less severely. The leads Obama enjoyed in Democratic states are diminished, too.

At the time Wang did his analysis, a big poll had her leading Trump 48 per cent to 47 per cent in pivotal Pennsylvania, where Obama beat Romney by about 5.5 points. There have been two smaller polls since then, both taken pre-RNC: one had her up by nine points on Trump, the other ... behind by two. Readers who followed the 2008 Democratic primaries closely will remember that Clinton’s father, Hugh Rodham, was from Scranton, Pa., and played tight end at Penn State. She was hoping to jumpstart her comeback against Obama there, and had her hopes crushed when she failed to connect with her fellow descendants of coal miners.

She does not have her husband’s eerie personal magnetism going for her. She also does not have her husband’s ludicrous sexual baggage, and the appeal of a potential woman president is strong, with an unstated “even if it has to be Hillary” tagging along invisibly. What Americans will remember from the original Clinton presidency was her strange habit of turning up as a central actor in all its major scandals that didn’t involve the flies of Bill’s trousers.

She complained memorably of being the target of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and from the vantage point of 2016 I do not see how it can be denied: the Clintons really did suffer scrutiny from a network of well-funded journalistic and legal Republican trash-mongers, and they are still haunted by the ghosts of dozens of bogus or ill-documented allegations.

What is equally obvious in 2016 is that Barack Obama was opposed by the same sort of forces, all equally thirsty for his blood, and he handed them a lot less ammunition. It was Hillary’s Rose Law Firm colleagues who organized the Whitewater debacle. When the Clinton partnership needed money, it was Hillary who discovered an unsuspected genius for trading cattle futures, with the help of friendly brokers who were un-finicky about imposing margin calls. Her role in the botched plan to clear out the apolitical lame-os in the White House Travel Office, and replace them with Arkansas cronies, seems pretty clear as a matter of history. She is, with less certainty, thought to have hired the central figure in “Filegate,” Craig Livingstone, who “mistakenly” channelled hundreds of Federal Bureau of Investigation reports on Clinton opponents to the West Wing.

She has, of course, had a long career since: there was the failed health-reform project (score another point for Obama), her Senate vote in favour of the twin post-9/11 wars, and her tenure as secretary of state, which, by its nature, will take a halfcentury to assess objectively. The 2012 storming of the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was a unique setback for American prestige, but it is likely voters will accept that a secretary of state cannot be responsible for hour-to-hour security of American diplomatic outposts — just as they seem to have accepted that if a secretary of state mishandles classified documents, they might just as well be unclassified.

It is the total Hillary effect, the overall impression, that disconcerts. Set aside “I’m With Her” and you can see the difficulty of favouring her as a U.S. president against anybody but Trump. “Sure, she has a weakness for dubious pals and hangerson, and a couple of awful siblings she has to keep out of the limelight, and a chronically casual attitude toward ethical responsibilities and document storage, and a sweet tooth for inflated speakers’ fees from Wall Street vampires, and ties to all kinds of nasty regimes through the Clinton Foundation ... but she IS the author of Dear Socks, Dear Buddy.”

She has themes, rather than huge concrete accomplishments, and the themes include cynicism, a keen eye for personal gain, and an ill-disguised sense of martyrdom. She has been unable to shake the stigma of having roots in hot Sixties radicalism, which makes a certain type of Republican regard her automatically as some kind of commie deviant. Trying to follow a more authentic radical into the White House doesn’t make things any easier for her, nor does it help that the Sixties environment, with its youth consciousness and racial struggle, seems to be recurring in some ways.

But she is really just an all-American political adventurer who has followed a long-plotted power trajectory and had remarkably few setbacks. She would fit right in at a dinner party with 19th-century political manipulators like Mark Hanna, Thurlow Weed, and Boss Tweed. After a few whiskies you’d never know the difference.