More Democrat worry over Mrs. Bill Clinton's electability

Bob Novak tells us something that we could well have figured our for ourselves:

Many of the Democratic congressmen who ousted Republicans in marginal House districts last year privately express concern about the impact on their re-election prospects if Hillary Clinton is nominated for president.

Because of the strong possibility that Sen. Clinton indeed will be the party's candidate, these congressmen will not openly express their fears. But they dread her impact from the top of the ticket.

Clinton's opponents don't raise the question in public. But there is such underground talk in Iowa, the state opening the battle for convention delegates, questioning her "electability."

Well, maybe we couldn't figure it out for ourselves. Back in the closing days of Bill Clinton's presidency when the idea of running Hillary for the Senate in order to prepare her for a White House run in 2008 was being floated I said that she would not enter the race unless she was guaranteed victory.

I didn't mean that she wouldn't run unless she was far ahead in the polls. I meant that she would not risk running unless she had some mechanism in place which would end up with her being declared the winner regardless of how anyone actually voted.

That view of the Clintons as invincible, always five steps ahead and willing to pursue their ambitions with utter ruthlessness does have some support in the facts - for one thing the small graveyard of dead bodies that have followed their political career. Another would be the truly large number of Clinton associates who have been investigated, arrested, tried and convicted or fled the country to avoid arrest, trial and conviction.

However Hillary is not invincible. The fact is that she would almost certainly lost her bid for reelection to the Senate if Rudolph Giuliani had not had a nervous breakdown over his colon cancer and stepped back from running. [BTY, what was up with that? The doctors caught the cancer early enough that he was virtually guaranteed a cure and the treatment was not such that it would have kept him from campaigning and the sympathy factor would have given him at least five points in the polls - is this a character issue?]

A look at Hillary's conduct as First Lady and the way she used the unprecedented power that Bill gave her to actively shape policy tells us that Hillary has wretched political instincts. The choices she made to fill cabinet posts all turned out to be disasters (we all do remember the evil Janet Reno and the buffoonish Joycelyn Elders, don't we).

Remember also Hillary's handling of the White House Travel Office situation. The Clintons wanted to replace the director and staff with their own cronies. They had every right to do this because the Travel Office staff are at-will employees who have no civil service protection. However it wasn't enough for Hillary to simply pink-slip them. No she had to try to frame them for federal felonies and send them to jail.

Then let us recall the way that Hillary handled the Paula Jones case. All Bill would have had to do was issue a vague apology for any "misunderstanding" of his entirely "honorable" intentions and write a check and let the mainstream media see that the whole thing went away. But Hillary went into full attack mode and made sure that the scandal was dragged out for as long as possible and got as much publicity as possible [was this an attempt to make Bill appear innocent so that she would not appear to be standing by her cheating husband as the co-dependant enabler in a dysfunctional relationship, or was she just such an arrogant elitist that she wasn't going see one dime of "her" money go to a piece of "trailer trash"?]

And then let us remember the mother of all political blunders. HillaryCare (tm). The attempted hostile takeover of one seventh of the American economy. A socialized health care scheme which was so thoroughly Stalinist that it even included jail terms for anyone who saw a doctor not chosen for them by the state. [The part about labor camps would have been added as an amendment during the House debate]

HillaryCare went down in flames in a wreck which combined the size of the Hindenburg disaster with the violence of a space shuttle burning up on reentry. Hillary couldn't even get Democrats to vote for it. The way the whole trainwreck was put together - in the strictest secrecy - the way she dealt with concerns brought up by lawmakers in her own party - threats that if they didn't shut up and toe the line that they would be demonized by the White House - reveal a woman with a soul far more like Adolph Hitler than Elenore Roosevelt.

I'm really thinking that Hillary isn't all that much to be feared. I do know that there is the "Oprah factor", where Oprah will tell her mindless followers that it is a good thing that a woman is running for president and that they should all go out and vote for her and 5 million women who have never voted before and will never vote again will go out and put Hillary over the the top on election day. That is a real concern.

Yes, I know that Oprah has endorsed Obama, but what about when Obama doesn't get the nomination? Will Oprah then endorse Hillary or will she sit out the general election? [She actually might, if Hillary wins the White House that means that Oprah will have to give up being the most powerful woman in America - she might be unwilling to do that]

But even if the Oprah factor works as feared there is the "I'm scared shitless of Hillary factor" to balance it. Hillary is disliked by a majority of the American people. Even people who will vote for her to keep a Republican out of the White House wish that they could vote for someone other than her. A great many people who don't like the Republicans enough to vote for them will dislike Hillary enough to vote against her.

Will that be enough to balance the never-before-voted women? I don't know, but if Republicans pick a good candidate and run an positive, aggressive and intelligent campaign there is every reason for Democrats to worry about next November.

BTY, in the polls where they do the head-to-head match-ups of all the possible Democrats against all the possible Republicans the Breck Girl does the best. Dims might put that into their bong and smoke on it for a bit.