Hillary vs McCain

I have put together a quick summary about why Hillary Clinton would lose an election to John McCain:

The War
It may seem strange for me to say Clinton will have problems distinguishing her stance(s) on the war from those of the hawkish Senator McCain, but the fact remains that, no matter how she tries to explain her decision to vote to authorize the war, she made a choice that has alienated many in the progressive ranks of the Democratic party, as Molly Ivins famously wrote about here. She may realize her folly now, although it is hard to tell since she refuses to admit she was wrong, but she lacks the leverage Senator Obama has with his opposition to the Iraqi debacle from the start. Should she win the nomination, there will be no candidates in the running who truly opposed the war. The support of disgruntled progressives is not guaranteed merely because Clinton is a Democrat – they may choose to sit this one out.

Campaign Finance/Lobbyists/Money
Even though I listed war as the first entry, this is the one that springs to mind when I think of a Clinton v. McCain match-up. John McCain is synonymous with campaign finance reform and the Clintons are infamous for their ability to finance campaigns, by hook or crook. Moreover, she has flaunted this ability to raise money by spending when she did not need to:

Another weakness Mr. Obama could exploit is Ms. Clinton’s huge spending in her 2006 re-election campaign for the Senate. Ms. Clinton has angered major contributors by spending more than $30 million—exceeding that of any other Senate candidate — against an unknown challenger. – The Swamp

Republicans will be quick to pounce on this pattern of campaign funding for which the Clintons are so adept. Add to this her apparent ease with taking money from lobbyists, and John McCain will have the moral high ground to beat up Clinton and appeal to independents who have tired of the machinations of the Washington establishment.

Washington Insider
Having spent eight years in the White House in addition to being part of the back and forth years of Bush, Clinton, Bush – Clinton would certainly be playing the role of an incumbent against the ‘maverick outsider’ John McCain. Forty percent of Americans have never lived when there wasn’t a Bush or a Clinton in the White House.

Even without that weight around her neck, she has chosen to run a partisan campaign – an old-school-Democratic-Republicans-are-bad campaign. The states she has been winning are traditional Democratic strongholds and the partisan rhetoric of the donkey plays well there. Against John McCain she will have to find a way to appeal to moderates and independents. We’ll get to more of that in a minute.

Baggage
All the talk of being a Washington Insider or an incumbent is nothing compared to the issues of baggage. By bringing the Clintons back, we are bringing back all the drama and scandal of the 1990’s. To make things easy, let’s just do a quick roll call of allegations: Gennifer Flowers, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, Johnny Chung and Craig Livingstone are some of the first to come to mind.

I remember being intensely aggravated at the quagmire that the Clinton presidency became while allegation on top of allegation dogged the couple . Bill was rendered impotent, ironically, by his own alleged indiscretions. I feel somewhat disgusted with myself at composing the above list, but these scandals and allegations will resurface compliments of the GOP war machine. We are already seeing signs.

Experience
We’ll just trump this up to her hyperbolic efforts to appear more qualified than Senator Obama. It is not hard to see that her ‘experience‘ in the White House was somewhat limited. Moreover, Timothy Noah of Slate takes a good look at her overall service and experience record here. If she continues to tout this as paramount and then faces off against McCain’s years of unquestionable experience…she is in trouble.

Independents and Males
A lot of Obama’s success against Hillary can so far be attributed to the obvious (African-Americans) but also another demographic that should be haunting all would-be Hillary voters: males. Obama has done considerably better with men than has Clinton. Moreover, her dependable base thus far, Latinos and women, begins to crumble when she faces McCain. According to pollsters, she also loses ground to McCain with independents. Obama fares much better and actually out paces McCain in a head-to-head for independents and does not suffer losses with men.

This is a small list designed to at least give Democratic voters some pause. I did not want to devote a lot of time to the whispers about how Republicans plan to use her polarizing image against her, nor did I want to devote too much space to the argument that there is a large group of voters out there who genuinely hate her.

The Repubs are going to pounce all over these and other talking points to undermine Senator Clinton’s campaign and I, for one, am not certain her candidacy can withstand the attack. What I am certain of is that it is a risk I am unwilling to take.

5 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI