The inevitable Hillary Clinton
The analysis is instant when I ask Tom Bowen, a Chicago political consultant, to handicap the 2016 Democratic presidential race. Hillary Clinton, expected to announce Sunday that she’s running, “is the most qualified nominee we’ve had in 30 years with the best chance for us to hold the White House and appoint justices to the court. It’s absurd to discuss anything else.”
He’s raining on the pundits’ parade that fills dead air and blank spaces with rank speculation. Inevitability is so boring. It’s like the U. Conn women’s basketball team.
“I share the conventional view that Hillary is unstoppable absent an unexpected sharp turn in the race that would almost certainly have to be a major scandal of some type (the email thing isn’t big enough to do it),” says David Hopkins, a political scientist at Boston College.
“She is very popular with the Democratic electorate and it’s hard to see what the argument would be that would deter large numbers of Democratic voters from supporting her, much less who the candidate would be who could persuasively deliver that argument.”
But what about former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley? Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb? Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders? Vice President Joseph Biden?
Or last week’s confounding surprise, Lincoln Chafee, the Republican-turned-Independent-turned-Democrat who served as the not especially memorable senator and governor from Rhode Island. Him?
Yeah, he’d seem a non-starter (not especially popular even back home) who’d try to reprise Barack Obama’s successful 2008 tactic of hanging Clinton with her vote for the Iraq War. But that seems a musty strategy.
Sure, there is Sen. Elizabeth Warren (DMass.) if you want to engage in wishful anybody-but-Hillary thinking, but she’s done everything sort of guest-starring on “Scandal” to announce she’s not interested.
Sanders and Warren, or their ilk, would run overtly against Clinton from the left, on both economic and foreign policy.
O’Malley is a bit more vaguely positioned. Perhaps, says Hopkins, he could try to pull off a redux of Obama’s successful 2008 primary campaign.
That means suggesting to liberal Democrats that he really and truly is to her left, but not be so explicit with the details that he might sabotage himself in the general election were he to win the nomination.
But replicating “change we can believe in” runs into several realities — most notably his inability to reprise Obama’s inherent support among black voters.
It’s nice to suggest you’d be a less divisive alternative to Hillary, but a lot nicer with a whole lot of votes already solidly behind you.
But the early cavalcade of aging white male Hillary rivals doesn’t exactly have much to lose. That includes O’Malley, Webb, Sanders and Chaffee.
Sanders already has a pretty solid national platform, with instant access to talk radio and cable TV, and could just try to needle her to move a bit his way ideologically.
But, as Hopkins and others note, Biden and Warren face downsides to a failed run.
Biden has had a good revival as an elder statesman of the administration. But he’s lost before and looked silly doing so. There’s the chance that he gets caricatured as a garrulous loser, commits characteristic rhetorical missteps and heads off into the Delaware sunset looking like a fool.
Warren is thrust into the role of a liberal conscience of the Senate, although some of that seems happenstance; sort of like big fish in small pond. That stature could be lost or damaged by a bad campaign.
And there just aren’t many examples since George McGovern’s 1972 Democratic nomination of an overtly left-leaning ideological candidate getting far.
Says Hopkins: “Warren can’t win just by carrying Cambridge and Berkeley.”
Boring as it may be to the pundits, Clinton feels nearly inevitable.
“Whatever questions linger, she is the most prohibitive favorite for an open seat nomination I have seen in my lifetime,” says Chicago’s David Axelrod, strategic architect of Obama’s long-shot White House ascension, including toppling Clinton.
“She has to answer those questions, by offering a compelling message and authentically connecting with people. But she is in a very strong position.”
She’s ‘the most prohibitive favorite I have seen,’ says David Axelrod, who engineered Obama’s
2008 upset of her