Re political leanings I like to think of myself as being MOR leaning progressive these days, but I honestly don’t think Hillary Clinton has a prayer being the next POTUS and it’s not on political grounds or the basis of her positions that I believe this. I just don’t think she has enough personal charisma to pull it off with enough voters. She’s very appealing to certain demographics, but if you want to be President you need to be able to reach and convince a wide swath of the electorate that you are the man or women for the job.
Reasonable people can disagree, but I just don’t think she has the required mass likeability and connection with people to be able to do this.
“likeability and connection with people” is something most politicians fake, so I think she should be able to pick up those skills. Any Republican candidate is going to be someone who panders to the Tea Party in the primaries so I think that will turn the majority of the population away from the Republican candidate. The major question which will determine who wins the Presidency will be the state of the economy. If the economy continues the way it is going now Hilary will win; if the economy turns bad the Republican candidate has a good chance of winning.
Charisma is overrated. Sure, you’re screwed if your opponent has it and you don’t, but most races don’t feature particularly charismatic candidates. We’ve just been spoiled by having three of the most electric candidates ever in our lifetime: Reagan, Clinton, Obama. But there are more candidates like Kerry, Dukakis, Romney, McGovern, Nixon, Mondale, etc. I see no superstars on the GOP side, just solid candidates who are qualified, just like Clinton is.
2016 won’t be about charisma, it will be about competence and ideas. And Clinton is well positioned to win such a race. Her real weakness is that she never takes a risk. A daring candidate, either in the primary or the general election, can mess up her plans and she hasn’t shown the ability to adjust her strategy.
While I tend to agree with your assessment of her personality, it may not be a deciding factor. Had she been nominated in 2008, she would have won, and that was before her solid performance as Secretary of State.
Should she choose to run in 2016, I think the chances of her election will depend far more on the quality of her opponent, the economy, whether Obamacare has had the wrinkles ironed out–stuff like that-- than on her mass charisma.
On a related note, I (a white male) absolutely think a female will be president one day. I’m in my 30s, so I wouldn’t even be surprised to see it during my lifetime.
BUT GOD, please not Hillary Clinton OR Sarah Palin. They’re BOTH daffy.
I’m right there with you, but I want to throw Michele Bachmann onto the “Oh my God people, don’t vote for these women just because they’re women and we haven’t had a female president!” pile too.
The thing about Clinton is her reputation has already bottomed out. There’s nothing Republicans can say about her that hasn’t already been said. Which gives her an advantage over other candidates - the negative attacks on them will sound fresh when they run for President.
And it’s also possible that a lack of warmth may be seen as an advantage for Clinton. A lot of Democrats may feel that Obama’s problem was he tried too hard to reach out to Republicans. There could be a backlash and Democrats might decide they’d rather have a candidate who will attack back against her attackers.
Not to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but I wonder whether she will get the Democrat nomination. She was seen as the almost inevitable Dem candidate in 2008, and Obama came out of nowhere to beat her. It’s not like he was particularly well known or had a long list of accomplishments under his belt; I suspect the reason he was nominated had more to do with back-room politicking than popular opinion. For some reason, the media jumped on his bandwagon and he won. Whatever factors prevented Hillary from being nominated in 2008 - I wonder if those factors are still in play?
I’ve never understood the appeal; what does she bring to the table? Zero charisma, minimal accomplishment, no identifiable ideology or belief system. If ambition alone were enough, she would have gotten the nomination in 2008, but she didn’t, and I don’t see how the passage of eight years since then raises her chances.
It’s not a shoe in, but Hillary would have beaten both McCain and Romney – though perhaps not by as large a margin as Obama – and considering the demographic changes lately, Hillary would probably beat whomever the idiot Republicans manage to get nominated in 2016.
How could Hillary not want to be the first female POTUS? Seriously, she’s one ambitious lady (and I say that in a good way), and to have that in your reach and so “no thanks” is, to me, unimaginable.
She can easily win as long as she doesn’t keep thinking that she can easily win. There’s something unsatisfying about doing the whole “Clinton” thing again, but the pubbies would have to pull a rabbit out of a hat to make me not vote for her if she is the democratic candidate.
I can only speak for myself, but there were three reasons I voted for Obama over Clinton in 2008, none of which are likely to apply in a hypothetical 2016 primary:
I thought that he was more politically gifted and more charismatic than she was, and thus more likely to actually win. (Probably true, but moot unless another Obama comes along, and I’d be surprised if one did.)
There seemed to be a large contingent of people who hated the Clintons with a burning passion, and at the time they didn’t seem to hate Obama as much, so I thought he was both more likely to win and more likely to be able to govern. (This now seems so far off the mark that I find it hard to believe that I ever believed it.)
I thought that he’d been right about the Iraq war and she’d been wrong. (Also probably true, but also – as I now realize – irrelevant, since the winning candidate has to live with the wars we’ve already got, and I’m not sure the current situation would be even slightly different if Clinton were president rather than Obama. Besides, I doubt the war will be a major campaign issue in 2016.)
Because of the outrageously high levels of hatred Hillary seemed subject to, I voted for Obama in the 2008 primary, though with some hesitation, mainly due to his rookie status. I’ll not make that mistake again.
The level of hatred Obama has engendered in spite of his numerous efforts to reach across the aisle (e.g. appointing Gates and backing off from single payer and even the public option ), tells me the Democratic candidate will be rabidly hated by the right wing nuts at Faux and on hate radio no matter who he or she is.