“[S]he has defied the rules of nature and gotten better looking over the years, which, along with her soap-opera marriage, probably explains some of her success with supermarket checkout-aisle publications,” writes Jonah Goldberg in a must-read piece on the many faces of Hillary Clinton.
Jonah makes a pretty convincing argument that, whatever face Hillary is wearing (hawk, race-baiter, cookie baker) most people don’t like her. A recent Gallup poll says that 51 per cent of respondents say they would not vote for her for president.
I think polls are problematical at this point-to think otherwise is to say campaigns don’t matter-but Hillary’s likeability factor is so low that even some liberal stalwarts don’t want her to run for president:
“Whatever the reason, some liberals have had enough. ‘I will not support Hillary Clinton for president,’ wrote Molly Ivins, the voice of conventional thinking on the left. ‘Enough. Enough triangulation, calculation and equivocation. Enough clever straddling, enough not offending anyone.’ The segment of Democrats who sanctified Cindy Sheehan can hardly countenance a presidential candidate who unapologetically voted for the war and positioned herself to the right of President Bush on foreign policy.
“The New Republic offers perhaps an even more devastating critique of Clinton for Democratic pragmatists: She can’t win. Marisa Katz dismantled the myth that Clinton can appeal to ‘red state’ voters because she won in upstate New York. Turns out former Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry each did better in upstate New York than she did. And Gore, a Southerner, couldn’t even win his home state of Tennessee. Meanwhile, a recent Gallup poll showed that 51% of Americans won’t even consider voting for Clinton.
“All of this could change. But there’s a great irony here. Hillary Clinton’s success over the last decade and a half has been in pretending to be her own woman while really playing one part or another for the benefit of the media, her husband or various feminist constituencies desperate for a role model to confirm all of their comfortable stereotypes.”