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May 09, 2006

Hillary's 'Negatives' May Do Her a Lot of Good

By John Podhoretz

What follows is an excerpt from John Podhoretz's new book Can She Be Stopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless..., out this week from Crown Forum.

Hillary Clinton will begin her quest for the presidency with a startlingly large number of Americans holding a negative opinion of her--somewhere around 40 percent. Lee Atwater, the late Republican political operative who helped develop some of the most potent anti-candidate techniques--the ones we call "negative campaigning"--once said that if you could push an office-seeker's negative number above 40 percent, there would be no way that office-seeker could win his race.

Since Hillary starts out there, at 40 percent, it would take very little change for her to reach the level beyond which she simply couldn't prevail in a national election. That has led some very intelligent Republicans and conservatives to believe that she cannot prevail in a national election.

It's a tempting thought for those who don't want Hillary to be president--the idea that the injuries she did to her own reputation in the 1990s will make it impossible for her to rise any higher than she already has. It's one thing to win an election as senator from New York, a state with a 3-to-1 Democratic advantage in registration, a Blue State that gets Bluer and Bluer by the day. It's quite another to win in a nation where twice as many people say they're "conservative" as say they're "liberal." The country hasn't forgotten who Hillary is, and if people have forgotten, they'll quickly remember once they've been reminded.

In fact, according to this analysis, she might be easier to beat than any other Democrat precisely because she finds herself at the starting gate with so many people actively disliking, even hating her. Democrats would therefore be handing Republicans a great gift by nominating Hillary, because it wouldn't require much energy or effort to ensure that tens of millions of Americans hold an unfavorable opinion of her in 2008. This analysis is tempting, reassuring, and promising. It is also wrong.

In previous decades, Hillary's negatives would have torpedoed her candidacy. But there have been major changes in the past fifteen years that have altered the rules of American politics. The changes have to do with the way Americans think about politics, where Americans place themselves on the political spectrum, the increasing bitterness between the two parties, and the rallying effect now caused when a partisan politician becomes a target for the other side.

Between 1980 and 2004, the number of Americans willing to identify themselves as Republicans grew by 25 percent, while the number of self-identified Democrats shrank by 20 percent. This collective realization has had profound political consequences. For one thing, it means we have now basically reached parity between the two parties, with passionate partisans on each side counting for somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the vote. These are now hard-core voters who, at least for the foreseeable future, will never, ever cast a vote for the other side.

In an election that swings to the Democrat, as was the case in 1996, the number of voters who say they are Democrats in exit polls and other data will be a tad higher than the Republican number, 38 to 36. In 2004, with the Republican Bush prevailing, the GOP number was a little higher than the Democratic number.

This all sounds like fantastic news for the GOP, no? The country becomes more and more Republican, the party takes over the legislature and then the presidency and does pretty well at the state and local levels as well--why then should there be worry about the probable competition from the most controversial woman in America?

Well, here's the bitter irony. The fact that the country has become more Republican as a result of the Clinton era may end up helping Hillary where the high-negatives problem is concerned. Polarization makes her elevation to the top of her party's heap more, not less, likely--and could get her elected.

Lee Atwater came up with his 40-percent formula during the 1980s, when far more Americans said they were Democrats than said they were Republicans--Democrats remained around 40 percent, while Republicans scored anywhere between 25 and 30 percent in the Harris poll. Given that statistic, it seemed an insuperable challenge for Republicans to win office anywhere but in solid GOP states. Atwater and others figured out how to break the Democratic logjam, especially in the South--a region that maintained a significant Democratic advantage in party registration even as Democratic voters turned out in droves both for Richard Nixon in 1972 and for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984.

Atwater and the Atwaterites knew that while voters were more likely to call themselves Democrats and to hold Democratic Party registration, they were also far more likely to describe themselves as conservative than liberal--according to the Harris poll, 37 percent conservative to 17 percent liberal in 1985. Though Republican strategists could not depend on a solid bloc of Republican voters that would bring their candidates within striking distance, they could peel voters away from the Democrat by going after him not because of his party affiliation but because of his views.

The goal of the GOP in the 1980s was to demonstrate to Democratic voters that there was a huge gulf between their values and interests and those of the elite Democrats who ran for office. If they could succeed at that task, they could get those voters to take a good look at the Republican candidate instead, for whom they would once never have voted. As a result, successful Republican campaigns outside GOP-dominated states focused on a candidate individually and specifically. They looked for symbolic ways to reveal how out-of-step he was with ordinary voters.

This divide is what gave rise to the notorious commercials that converted the word "liberal" into a horrifying pejorative, spat out of the mouth of an unseen narrator with the same sort of contempt with which you might say "child molester."

It worked. Atwater and others used the anti-liberal technique brilliantly in presidential campaigns and then, slowly but surely, in senatorial, congressional, and gubernatorial elections. And over time those once-Democratic voters became unconscious Republican fellow travelers, generally preferring GOP candidates over Democrats but still not quite ready to get off the donkey and climb aboard the elephant. They moved instead into the independent category. And there was indeed a history-altering independent hiccup in 1992 when a huge mass of them--22 million--expressed their anger with the GOP and their disgust with the Democrats by voting for the incoherent no-nonsense, billionaire flake, Ross Perot.

Only two years later, in 1994, the jig was up. The Perot voter basically threw in the towel--and threw in his lot with the GOP. The result was the takeover of Congress by the GOP for the first time in forty years in one of the most lopsided legislative elections in American history.

What happened? The Clintons happened. The speed of the shift toward the GOP, which began in earnest in 1980 and slowed down during the recession of 1990-91, was hastened by the advent of the Clintons on the national scene. Between 1992 and 1994, the Clintons did so many things in so many ways to appall and disgust their fellow Americans--both ideologically and personally--that an astonishing number of them decided to climb aboard the elephant and stay there. In 1994, the political realignment that had been in the works for twenty years finally took root--and for that, Republicans have Bill and Hillary Clinton to thank.

As the Clinton candidacy threaded the needle of American politics and eked out a victory in 1992 and then stumbled and bumbled along in 1993 and 1994, it seemed that every word out of Hillary Clinton's mouth, every action she took and every comment made in praise of her by her supporters,was designed to outrage and enrage traditionalist America.

Hillary Hatred is one of the reasons that, between the election in 1992 and the one in 1994, long-time GOP fellow travelers at last admitted to themselves that they were Republicans, and what's more, that they were Republicans to the core.

Once people achieve partisan consciousness, they are like converts to a faith or newly minted members of a tribe. They no longer need to be convinced to vote, or how to vote, or whom to vote for. They know. And they know, in large measure, because they know whom they don't want to hold office. The other party is the Other. Its politicians are the Bad Guys--not Osama bin Laden bad guys, more like the New York Yankees are to Boston Red Sox fans.

For instance, Republicans who didn't know very much about John Kerry didn't need much convincing in the spring of 2004 that he was a Bad Guy--and were very much open to every conceivable bit of information that might be added to the overall indictment of his character, his political record, his career, even his marital choices. Republicans believed Kerry was a flip-flopper. They also believed he was a dangerous, down-the-line liberal ideologue--even though you can't quite believe both things at the same time and still be consistent.

By the time Election Day rolled around, John Kerry had earned the solid disgust of an enormous portion of the American electorate, despite the fact that most of them hadn't heard of him until the beginning of the year. He was disliked about as much as Hillary.

And that's the key point. Add the current polarized environment to the incredible velocity with which news travels and new stories are circulated by cable news, talk radio, and the Internet, and a nobody can become a hated villain in no time.

What this means, in turn, is that any candidate who becomes his or her party's nominee in the spring of 2008 will be viewed very, very negatively by 35 to 40 percent of the nation's electorate. That would be true even of the fabled John McCain, who imagines that he possesses magical powers to melt the hearts of Democrats. Once professional Democratic campaign guys get through with him, McCain won't be melting Democratic hearts--not when they find out he likes guns, opposes abortion in all ways and at all times, has an anti-union voting record, and wants to cut government spending by 10 percent.

Democrats will dislike any Republican candidate, and Republicans will dislike any Democratic candidate. And the number of people in the middle, who decide elections, is actually shrinking. According to Karl Rove, Bush's brilliant political adviser, by 2004 the size of the truly independent, truly unaligned electorate had shrunk to 7 percent. It had been well over 20 percent throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

Now, without George W. Bush in the mix to provoke the incredibly strong emotions, both positive and negative, he evoked in the 2004 election--emotions that helped drive the highest turnout in American history, some 122 million voters making up more than 61 percent of the electorate--perhaps the number in the middle will grow.

But in all likelihood, it won't grow much.

So if most of those with negative feelings about nominee Hillary in 2008 are already hardcore Republican voters, all her nomination will do is ensure a high Republican turnout. Of course, the kind of angry attention her nomination would receive from Republicans would allow Democrats to play ju-jitsu and make use of the very sorts of attacks Republican will level against her to enrage Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters and ensure a high turnout on their end.

Thus her high negatives, in a perverse way, could inspire passionate support from Democrats who might otherwise have lukewarm feelings about her. For just as Rush Limbaugh arose as a counterweight to the mainstream media in the 1990s, now explicitly left-wing partisan media have arisen as a counterweight to conservative media. Their purpose is to paint liberals and Democrats as victims of abuse by the mainstream media and by the "vast right-wing conspiracy" Hillary complained about in 1998.

The people who populate leftist talk radio and the blogosphere are far more aware of what they hate than what they love--and what they hate are Republicans and conservatives. The hatred Republicans and conservatives feel for Hillary once endeared her to Leftists. And should she become the target of Right-wing scorn in the run-up to 2008, they will will fall in love with her all over again. They will defend her and attack on her behalf and raise money for her and wait on lines for her and have concerts for her and do everything they did for John Kerry, a candidate no one could love.

In short, the passionate and polarized partisan populace will not consider any candidate for high office sufficiently authentic unless that candidate provokes heated opposition from the other party. It is not enough that the candidate satisfy you. Indeed, when it comes right down to it, no candidate will ever really satisfy a passionate ideologue. But it is more than sufficient if the candidate in question really, really pisses off the other team.

Thus, Hillary's high negatives may end up doing her a great deal of good.

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