Dick Morris: With cultural forces behind her, Hillary can win in '08

The Republican Party appears to be coalescing around the happy assumption that, while Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, she cannot be elected. So, the self-delusive logic says, she is really God's gift to the Republican Party.

This optimistic set of assumptions comes through loud and clear in the comments the president and Karl Rove made to Bill Sammon as he interviewed them for his new book Strategery. But their confidence indicates simply that they don't even begin to understand what they will be up against in a Hillary candidacy.

It has always been Mrs. Clinton's strategery to wrap herself in the generic. By embracing a set of liberal issues, she avoids personal scrutiny. By identifying with working women who are "trying to balance career and family", she buys a pass on charges of a conflict of interest over Rose Law Firm representation of Arkansas while her husband was governor. And now, by hiding behind the generic question of "Are we ready for a woman president?" she invites the question of whether we want this particular woman in the Oval Office.

The cultural forces that Hillary's candidacy will unleash - from the media, from Hollywood and from the cultural icons who decree our lifestyles - will be far beyond those that normally line up behind a presidential candidate. A small foretaste emerged in ABC TV's show "Commander in Chief," in which Geena Davis plays a female president who masters the men and the crises that litter her path. What other presidential candidacy was foreshadowed by a prime-time, hour-long weekly television show?

Hillary's candidacy will not be Democratic so much as demographic and not nearly as political as it will be cultural. The pent-up emotions of half of America will rise to the surface just as Catholics rallied to JFK's candidacy in 1960.

And white women are the swing vote in our politics. George W. Bush carried them by only 1 percent in 2000 and lost the popular vote. He walked away with white women in 2004 by a 14-point margin and carried the electorate by 3.5 points.

White men will vote against Hillary, of course, but are they likely to exceed the 2-1 margin by which they backed Bush in 2004? Or is the GOP organization really going to be able to turn out more than 62 million voters, an increase of 12 million over its 2000 total with very little increase in national population?

Blacks will vote for Hillary with genuine affection rather than the mere duty that animated their support of John Kerry, and Hispanics, who strongly backed Hillary in New York state, are likely to return to the overwhelmingly Democratic vote they cast in 2000, rather than the more balanced ballots they cast in 2004.

In the face of these demographic arguments, can Hillary's admittedly brittle public performances assure her defeat? Will voters see through her posture of moderation and hawkishness on terrorism? White men will. But white women won't. And Hillary will be elected.

Last year, my wife and I wrote about the urgency of a Condoleezza Rice candidacy to nullify Hillary's advantages. Since then, Rice, despite her best efforts to deny a candidacy, has caught fire among the American electorate. In the most recent Gallup poll, 12 percent named her, unaided, as the Republican they would like to see run, and the most up to date head-to-head poll, by the Marist Institute, shows her locked in a three-way tie with Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, with each candidate winning 22 percent of the Republican primary vote.

Those who listen to the melodious tones of Bush and Rove do a disservice to our country. The threat of a Hillary Clinton victory is real and present, and the usual suspects - the likes of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Virginia Sen. George Allen, Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, New York Gov. George Pataki et al. are not likely to be able to defeat her. Rudy could, but he won't be nominated because of his social liberalism. McCain could, but he lacks popularity with the GOP rank and file.

Morris, a former political adviser to Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and President Bill Clinton, is the author of Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race.

In the face of these demographic arguments, can Hillary's admittedly brittle public performances assure her defeat?
Will voters see through her posture of moderation and hawkishness on terrorism?
White men will. But white women won't. And Hillary will be elected.--Dick Morris

'04 ELECTION PROVIDES CLUE

... [W]e must go back to November 8, 2004, which is exactly six days after the re-election of George W. Bush.

The venue is Washington Journal (C-SPAN).

Enter Harold Ickes, looking weirder, more Ichabod-Crane-on-crank, than usual. Looking weirder still when one remembers that Harold Ickes is a strictly behind-the-scenes sort of guy.

Only something very important could have coaxed Harold Ickes onto center stage....²¹

Forgoing the standard niceties, Ickes launches into his planned tirade. He accuses Bush of terrorizing white women to get their vote.²² (The way he carried on, you would think he was accusing the president of rape or something.)²³

"If you look at white women, and I think that was the key to this election, Kerry won 45% based on the exit polls--but they're generally in agreement--Kerry won 45%, Bush won 55% of white women.

By contrast, Bush won only 45% of white women in 2000, so he upped is percentages by 10 points.

In 1996, bill clinton won 48% of white women compared to Bob Dole's 43%.

That is a huge, huge difference. I don't think you can lay all that at the doorstep of moral values.

I think that this president unabashedly and abjectly took the issue of terror and used it to terrorize... white women."

HEAR HAROLD ICKES
Washington Journal
Nov. 8, 2004
C-SPAN

Now fast forward to October 11, 2005. Susan Estrich, alignments adjusted upward--ALL alignments--is on Hannity and Colmes. She is there to huckster The Case for Hillary Clinton, ²⁴ both the book and candidate.

Estrich's spiel turns her recent dire warning to the Democrats ("The clintons are sucking up all the air. Get them off the stage!" )²⁵ on its literal head.²⁶ (Air? Who needs air when you have a clinton?)

ICKES + ESTRICH PROVIDE ROADMAP FOR HILLARY DEFEAT (oops!)

Susan Estrich attempts to tie the fate of all women to the fate of the hillary clinton candidacy in a cynical attempt to get the women's vote.

She argues that hillary clinton is the best chance, probably the only chance, for a woman president in our lifetime.

The false and demeaning argument and offensive gender bias aside, someone ought to clue in Susan Estrich. Gender feminism requires as its token a functional female.

So why is Susan Estrich making such a transparently spurious and insulting argument? She isn't that dumb.

For the same reason Harold Ickes is fulminating on C-SPAN.

The election of 2004 confirmed missus clinton's worst fears:
9/11 and the clintons' willful, utter failure for eight years to confront terrorism) were transformative. They caused a political realignment--for all practical purposes permanent--that is not good news for clinton, or for the Democrats, generally.

The white woman, the only real swing voter, the demographic the Democrats MUST get in order to win the White House, has turned red.

Next installment...
THE ROADMAP FOR DEFEATING HILLARY

In the immediate aftermath of the 2004 presidential election, a journalistic consensus emerged to explain George W. Bush's victory. Despite the sluggish economy and deteriorating situation in Iraq, voters supported Bush primarily because of his values. One prominently featured exit poll question showed "moral values" to be the most important issue for voters, ahead of terrorism, Iraq, and the economy. Backlash against the Massachusetts court ruling allowing gay marriage and attraction of Bush's appeals to Christian faith helped bring out socially conservative voters and cement Bush's second term. This explains why Bush won Ohio, for example, where an anti-gay marriage proposal was on the ballot. However compelling this story might be, it is wrong.

Instead, Bush won because married and white women increased their support for the Republican ticket....

In this article I briefly account for the factors behind Bush's rise in the state-by-state popular vote between 2000 and 2004. This is not the same as identifying who elected Bush. That sort of analysis would put responsibility on white men since they voted 61-38 for Bush and comprise almost half of the active electorate. Instead, I focus on what changed between 2000 and 2004. In this view, it is white women who are responsible because they showed more aggregate change.

Identifying a cause for this shift looks for an explanation also in things that changed in the past four years. For example, John Kerry was not exactly Al Gore, so differences between Bush's two opponents could be a factor. But I suggest that such differences are dwarfed by a much larger intervention: the attacks of September 11. Turnout was up in 2004 because the perceived heightening of the stakes after 9-11 and because of intense competition between the candidates in a small number of battleground states. Higher turnout also appears to have helped Bush slightly. But it was the shift of married white women from the Democratic camp to the Republican camp that gave him the edge in 2004.

Post Election 2004: An Alternative Account of the 2004 Presidential Election
BarryC.Burden
Harvard University
The Forum, Volume2, Issue 42004 Article2
burden@fas.harvard.edu

READ MORE:

IMPERIOUS HILLARY
(THE REPORTS OF HER DEATH ARE GREATLY UNDERSTATED)
Mia T, 12.05.05

WHY HILLARY MUST NOT WIN. WHY HILLARY CANNOT WIN.

(ICKES + ESTRICH PROVIDE ROADMAP--oops!--FOR HILLARY DEFEAT)

Mia T, 12.10.05

The cultural forces that Hillary's candidacy will unleash - from the media, from Hollywood and from the cultural icons who decree our lifestyles - will be far beyond those that normally line up behind a presidential candidate. A small foretaste emerged in ABC TV's show "Commander in Chief," in which Geena Davis plays a female president who masters the men and the crises that litter her path. What other presidential candidacy was foreshadowed by a prime-time, hour-long weekly television show?

-- Dick Morris

The clintons, as is their wont, are now taking this proxy scheme to even more outrageous extremes.

The latest: an actual hillary clinton proxy presidency, populated on both sides of the camera by assorted rodham and clinton ex-staffers, sycophants and should-be felons, witness the latest hire.

'Commander-in-Chief,' a show that sets out to crown a 'queen,' instead exposes the kitschy simplemindedness of Hollywood fantasy and the special sway and shortsightedness of the pathologic ego.

Mia T, 10.27.05
THE DANGER OF RUNNING VICARIOUSLY
Bill O'Reilly chews up and spits out the hillary clinton candidacy
(clip included)

Running vicariously, as we have argued, has its risks.

What was supposed to be Hollywood propaganda to make a hillary presidency marginally palatable has instead become a parable about missus clinton's own dystopian future.

ABC announced the other day that it is pulling "Commander-in-Chief" off the air "until spring." Missus clinton's proxy presidency, you see, has been in a ratings free fall ever since "American Idol" took it on.

In a perverse life-mirrors-art moment, support for the real-life missus clinton's presidency has plummeted, too. This even sans Rudy, her real-life "American Idol" opponent.

'Ars artia gratis.' Please!

Samuel Goldwyn must be turning over in his grave.

Mia T, 02.02.06
'HIATUS' FOR HILLARY?

If you think the Swiftboat Vets let Kerry have it, wait until you see what is waiting in the wings for Hillary

Hillary's candidacy is hard to evaluate because she's only run for office once, and her one campaign had only one sentinel event.

Rick Lazio lost the election the night he crossed the stage at their debate to hand Hillary a piece of paper.

This was a simple, and usually effective, piece of debate theater.

For Lazio, it was a catastrophe. Hillary felt "threatened". Hillary's friends in the press ran articles on "controlling" men, on batterers, on domestic violence.

On election day, Hillary ran a million votes behind Al Gore in New York City and Buffalo - this is not a normal situation for a normal NY RAT senator.

She was elected by the votes of Upstate "conservative" women - women who normally vote right, but who could not resist projecting all of their little slights and injuries onto pooor Hillary, who was"'violated" on debate night by Rick Lazio and his little piece of paper.

The point is, what worked brilliantly against Kerry will elect Hillary

The right campaign strategy to beat her has not been discovered yet, because she is far from a normal candidate - and her second race is for all the marbles, leaving no margin for error by her opponent, who will be playing a game without rules.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.