Hillary’s best hope

In June 1992, Ross Perot led a presidential poll with 35 percent. Then-President George H.W. Bush had 31 percent. Bill Clinton had 25 percent.

A lifetime then ensued before November.

Perot dropped out in July, then got back in. Clinton unleashed his campaign energy and brilliance. He drubbed Bush in a town hall-style debate in which Bush didn’t know the price of groceries and looked at his watch.

In the end Clinton got 43 percent, Bush 37 and Perot 19.

So Hillary Clinton was right Sunday when she said on Meet the Press that presidential polls at this point in an election year historically mean nothing. She had best hope history holds. Let us synopsize how bad things are for her at the moment as reflected in two polls released over the weekend, one from the Washington Post and the other from a partnership of NBC and the Wall Street Journal.

She is in a statistical dead heat— three points ahead in one poll, two points behind in the other, both in the margin for error—with, in Donald Trump, the most unpopular person ever polled in presidential races, which she would be if not for him. Trump’s negatives tend to the 60 percent range; Clinton’s to the 55 percent range.

The national mood is to upturn the despised state of politics as usual, a state of mind that was festering with Perot but is raging now. She embodies politics as usual while Trump represents politics as very unusual.

White people favor him by 15 to 20 points. Women favor her, but only by a dozen to 15 points, not much considering she contends to be the first woman president and what he’s said about women.

Republicans are grudgingly coalescing for Trump to protect party interests generally. Democrats are divided, some bitterly, between Hillary and Bernie Sanders. And Sanders voters currently say they can’t abide either Trump or Clinton, but, if forced to choose, slightly prefer him and his outsider independence over her politics as oh-so-usual, not to mention her weakly tactical and incremental imitation of the revolution Sanders preaches.

It comes down to this stark assessment: Clinton is vulnerable against a socialist curmudgeon in her own party and weak generally against the most despised major presidential candidate ever to appear in American political polling.

It’s so bad for Hillary that both polls suggest that the only hopeful news for her is that her best ally and likeliest potential rescuer is … drum roll … Barack Obama.

Yes, the rehabilitating president, unlike Clinton and Trump, is rightside-up in his favorable and unfavorable ratings—at 51 percent favorable in one, 49 percent in the other, eight to 10 points higher than his negative rating.

That means that, at the moment, a fiercely legacy-protecting Obama, not Clinton herself and not her famously talented husband, should star in the road show she’ll need in urban areas in swing states come October.

This is not her husband’s Democratic Party or electorate. That “new Democrat” triangulation business to appeal to the mushy middle and independents and business moderates is long gone.

The Democratic objective now is to energize liberals and rack up with blacks, Hispanics and urban and suburban women—to so dominate in greater Philly, for example, that the rest of Pennsylvania can’t catch Trump up.

If these current polls were likely to be relevant by October, then Democrats ought to dump Clinton and nominate Sanders.

But the conventional thinking remains that Sanders looks stronger against Trump only in a vague and abstract way because he has not endured a single negative attack. It’s that he would be destroyed by Republican assaults on his avowed democratic socialism.

The key phrase is “conventional thinking.” There always is the possibility that we’ll wake Wednesday after the general election to behold the utter demise of conventional thinking, even to find ourselves saying Democrats would have been better off to nominate the cranky old revolutionary socialist.

For the moment, the prevailing need for Clinton is for Sanders to:

Acknowledge he will not get the Democratic nomination.

Warmly and enthusiastically endorse her, even to move for her nomination by acclamation.

Implore his angry outsider supporters to put aside their resentment and make the practical choice, somehow with enthusiasm.

If the race comes down to the level of Democratic enthusiasm and the extent of fear of Trump—as it well could—then that aforementioned road show for Hillary in October through urban centers probably ought to bear a double billing. It should be the Barack and Bernie Show.

Bill should be on the bench, along with, for that matter, Hillary herself.

Right now her best hope is that the race is not at all about her and not at all reliant on her.