For those of you who ready Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball (political analysis/election predictions), you will have noticed that he recently wrote an article entitled “The Hillary Dilemma.” He concludes that although Hillary’s credentials outweigh the other candidates’, making her seem like the strongest candidate in the field, she would actually be the weakest nominee for the Democratic party.
Like Clintonfan42, I think that many of Sabato’s points are weak in his analyis. First, he states that any Democratic nominee this election can count on inflated, if grudging, electoral support because the republican party has managed to dig itself deeper and deeper into an Iraq and scandal-lined hole over the past eight years. However, he then says that “The final several percent of swing voters needed to get Hillary Clinton over the top in the general election will vote for her only with the greatest reluctance, more as a way to stop a Republican than as an endorsement of her.” Is this really a problem for the Democratic party? Clearly, the best candidate would be, as Sabato says, a ‘unifier’ able to bridge the growing partisan divide, one that would sweep swing voters off their feet during the election, and encourage productive cooperation across the aisle once in office. I just think that’s wishful thinking. The Democrats can’t produce a candidate like that right now, and counting the inability to generate a wave of good feeling for the party as a particular weakness of Hillary’s is a misplacement of criticism.
Later, Sabato speculates about future scandals in the Clinton family. He correctly points out that the public is already super-saturated with this type of news. However, what he terms as “mass amnesia” of Hillary’s past scandals may instead be the public’s conscious decision to move on from it. Also, I think serious consideration should be given to the idea that the Clintons are simply more resilient to scandal than other politicians, and that this may speak to their intense staying power. Lastly, is it fair to consider the possibility of future scandal when deciding whether a candidate should be given the democratic nomination right now? It is true that Hillary is more of a controversy-magnet than other candidates, but this might also make her tread more carefully than others. I find taking her possible future indiscretions when deciding her strength as a nominee in the present a bit questionable.
However, I think that Sabato brings up some excellent general considerations about the present US electoral system at the end of the article. He asks,
“How is it that the country is on the verge of filling its highest office for the sixth consecutive term from one of two families? That every President from 1989 to 2017 may be a Bush or a Clinton is a national disgrace. What has happened to the American Republic? How does it differ from a banana republic–where a couple of dominant families often run everything for generations?”
The fact that the American electorate seems to love recycling candidates from well-established political families has to speak to the zeitgeist and preference for electing candidates for reasons of personal attachment or security in name recognition. It could also point to the entrenchement of our political system. Like Sabato, I don’t have the answers, but think these questions are very valuable.
