Hilzoy’s Case Against Clinton

Hilzoy makes the case against Clinton. I substantially agree, both on policies and politics, but I’m not certain about this:

In this context, I think that nominating Hillary Clinton would be a disastrous mistake. Of all the people whom we are at all likely to nominate, she is the one whom people would be most inclined to believe the worst of. Some of those people — the ones who thought the Clintons had Vince Foster killed and hung crack pipes on their Christmas trees — are presumably unreachable by Democrats. But others — the ones who don’t pay close attention to these things, and came away from the 1990s with a vague sense that the Clintons were just plain sleazy — are people we can reach.

If we nominate Hillary Clinton, then I assume that the Republicans will go after her, and that they will not restrict themselves to attacking her policies and her record. When they do, then all those people who are already inclined to think the worst of Hillary Clinton will, for that reason, be prepared to find those attacks believable. Stories about her sleaziness, her underhandedness, her cold and calculating nature, etc., will be a lot less likely to strike them as implausible, overreaching, mean-spirited, malicious, or vile. And that means that the chances that people will see standard Republican attacks for what they are are dramatically reduced.

Here’s the thing; while we can always say that “it could be worse” I’m not convinced that, in the case of Hillary Clinton, the attacks actually can get worse than those that have already been leveled against her. The Republicans have literally (and I mean literally to read “literally” rather than figuratively) accused her of every crime that it is possible for one person to commit, and she still polls well against the strongest Republican candidates.

There are two potential pro-Clinton narratives to draw from this argument:

1. Further attacks against Clinton will yield diminishing returns for the Republicans. As she has already been accused of everything (and, as she’s the most identifiable politician in America, I’m unconvinced that any potential voters haven’t been exposed to such attacks) more attacks are unlikely to convince anyone not yet convinced that Clinton is bad, and may in fact produce a backlash; once you’ve said that someone is a drug dealing murdering man-hating lesbian, attacking her health care policy is rather pointless.
2. Obama has not yet been subjected to this level of attack, and is not likely to be immune to it; whether true or not, the Republican noise machine will cook up some vile line of attack that it likely to see some success, suggesting that Obama’s better poll performance won’t stand the scrutiny of a general election.

This is why I remain reluctant to concede that Clinton is less electable than Obama. In the first place, I think that electability is a very difficult trait to assess, and in the second I can see some specific reasons why current polling of the two prominent Democrats may wrongly assess the situation. That said, Scott and Hilzoy are right to point out that Hillary’s reputation is farther left than her policies, which is a bad thing, and that Hillary may mobilize a huge component of the Republican electorate.

All that said, the vote against the war is important to me, and I expect to vote Obama. But I can’t say that a Clinton victory will disappoint me.

Cross-posted to TAPPED.