Say a prayer for Hillary: if you want a Republican in the White House, that is

National Review, Feb 25, 2008 by Richard Lowry, Kate O'Beirne

AT a town-hall meeting in Derry, N.H., in January, Mitt Romney tried to stir the crowd in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama's upset victory in Iowa: "We cannot afford Barack Obama as the next president!" About two people applauded. The next day, in Nashua, he mentioned Obama, but added, "I can't wait to meet Hillary Clinton face to face." Sustained applause.

Taken together, those two very different reactions provide a reliable barometer of conservative sentiment toward the Democratic candidates. Conservatives have long experience loathing Hillary Clinton. It has become second nature. If they ever do come to feel the same way about Barack Obama--and they may not--it will take time. Hillary Clinton will long hold pride of place as an object of scorn and a source of motivation for conservatives.

Hillary is smart, articulate, and disciplined; she has not made major strategic mistakes in her primary campaign. But she is hampered by his-and-hers political baggage, a fact that is especially apparent when she is compared with the charismatic, seemingly post-partisan Obama.

And Hillary has accrued additional weaknesses as the campaign has progressed. She began with high negatives, a chilly persona, and a liberal voting record. As a Washington insider who personifies an era of bitter partisan politics, she was always going to have to struggle to present herself credibly as "an agent of change," to use the phrase she favors.

But only over the past several weeks has Hillary's campaign given Republicans reason to wish devoutly for her success in the primary. She has earned the vocal disapproval of the liberal elite in a way the Clintons had never quite managed before, even through the fundraising scandals, the Lewinsky affair, and the payola pardons. If she wins the nomination, she will be forced to court the party's angry-Left base at a time when she would be better served by reaching out to the center. She has used Bill as an obvious crutch, weakening her own image and saddling herself with him for the rest of the campaign, while her feminist allies have made it clear they will do all they can to define her candidacy as an exercise in vintage 1970s-style feminism.

Hillary has gone from "inevitable" to "potential general-election disaster." Republican strategists are gleeful over the possibility that she'll win the nomination. What haunts the Grand Old Party is the specter of an Obama primary victory, which would deny Republicans their best opportunity to squeak back into the White House in what otherwise should be a difficult 2008. Republicans disdain Hillary, but feel that they need her--a twisted kind of political codependence.

The biggest shift over the last few weeks in Hillary's standing has been the amazing wave of revulsion directed at the Clintons by the liberal opinion elite. Early in the campaign, Hillary's coverage was positive--sometimes adoring. The media considered it odd that someone so "warm and witty" in person could be such a polarizing figure; only an irrational Hillary-hater, they argued, could see a committed liberal in this sensible moderate who has worked so diligently for bipartisan consensus. That Hillary is history. Now, the narrative is that she's a down-and-dirty fighter who is polarizing her own party's activists. The endearing chuckle has been replaced by a forced cackle.

In the 1990s, liberals felt obliged to defend the Clinton White House against a congressional assault; scare figures such as Newt Gingrich and Kenneth Starr could not be allowed to take down the Democrats' champions. But now there is no Clinton White House, no Republican Congress, no Gingrich and no Starr on the scene. Liberals can consult their moral compass again--and it's pointing toward Obama. If liberals who agree with the Clintons on most policy issues can't stand them, wait until voters who don't share that agenda make themselves heard in the fall.

WHAT WENT WRONG

A big part of the trouble, unsurprisingly, is Bill. As late as December, Hillary--in her iteration as policy maven and sensible hawk--had been holding her own on the campaign trail and debate stages. Bill hadn't been much in evidence. Her presidential bid looked like her campaign in New York in 2000. Then Obama beat her in Iowa. Now, Bill is back--and so, too, is Billary; the negative neologism invented by the Right has gained new currency among liberals.

Colbert King, writing in the Washington Post, characterizes the Clintons as "two people reeking of self-pity and spoiling for fights with anyone who has the temerity to stand in their way." St. Petersburg Times columnist Philip Gailey writes, "If the price of taking down Obama is to tarnish his post-White House image as a global statesman, Clinton doesn't mind paying it. The Big Dog is having too much fun doing what he does best, which is being un-presidential." Nicholas von Hoffman writes in the The Nation, "The Clintons cannot compete with the enthusiasm Obama sets off so they must destroy it. Their tactic is disillusionment. They are the quashers of the dream." And on and on it goes.