Monday, November 24, 2014

Obama Is Damaging Hillary’s Chances

Mrs. Clinton’s popularity has plunged, and she is increasingly trapped by her former boss’s record.



The president with Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, at a 2012 cabinet meeting. AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

By 

DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN And

PATRICK H. CADDELL

Nov. 23, 2014 5:00 p.m. ET

451 COMMENTS

President Obama ’s high-risk immigration gamble may have severe consequences for Washington, the country and the Democratic Party, most of all Hillary Clinton .

Mrs. Clinton’s putative bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is already running into trouble. The national exit poll from the recently completed midterm elections showed her with less than a majority of voters (43%) saying she would make a good president. When pitted against an unnamed Republican candidate, Mrs. Clinton lost 40% to 34%.

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Those grim numbers followed on a September WSJ/NBC poll showing a plunge in Mrs. Clinton’s favorability rating, to 43%, from 59% in 2009.

And that was before President Obama launched a defiant post-midterm campaign discarding political compromise and unilaterally doubling down on his unpopular policies. As a candidate, Mrs. Clinton would likely inherit a damaged party—and as a former member of his administration, she would struggle with the consequences of Mr. Obama’s go-it-alone governance.

The latest indication of the president’s politically damaging approach was his move on Thursday to unilaterally grant amnesty to an estimated five million illegal immigrants. A Rasmussen poll released Nov. 18 found that 53% of likely voters opposed the amnesty without congressional approval, while 34% approved. Moreover, 62% of those polled said that the president lacks the legal authority to take the action without congressional approval, and 55% said Congress should challenge the executive order in court.

That’s a problem for Democrats, who will be asked to defend the president, as they have had to do with other Obama policies, like the Affordable Care Act, that lack the support of most Americans.

Another source of trouble for Democrats: The proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which is enormously popular—59% of Americans are in favor, 31% against, according to a Pew poll this month. With the project so heavily favored, the president could score an easy win by backing the pipeline, but instead he has aligned himself with the elitist, environmentalist left led by billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer.

Mr. Obama’s willingness to disregard the public’s wishes will hurt Mrs. Clinton in particular. The president’s former secretary of state is already struggling to forge an independent identity without disowning the president. It will be almost impossible for Mrs. Clinton to directly oppose him over the next two years, though she will certainly continue to try to distance herself from Mr. Obama, as she did during her summer book tour. But if the president continues to lose the support of Democrats and moderates—as Mrs. Clinton has—she might have no alternative but to shelve her presidential ambitions.

If she does run, Mrs. Clinton could face a challenge from liberal populist Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Mrs. Clinton has struggled to adopt a populist mantle. The challenge was nowhere more in evidence than when she appeared in Massachusetts with Ms. Warren in October, awkwardly urging the crowd: “Don’t let anybody tell you that, you know, it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” She later explained that the line hadn’t come out right.

Mrs. Clinton will have to work harder than that to dispel the impression among liberal Democrats that she is, as the line goes, the “candidate from Goldman Sachs , ” having numerous ties to the institution. The threat to a Clinton campaign from a Democratic rival running to her left, as Mr. Obama did in 2008, increased last week when populist former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb announced he is setting up an exploratory committee for a 2016 presidential bid.

Mrs. Clinton will also have to contend with her role as the architect of “HillaryCare” in the 1990s, a clear forerunner to the Affordable Care Act, which was not popular with Americans when it was passed and now has the approval of only 37%, according to a recent Gallup poll.

It appears that Mrs. Clinton is trying to have it both ways on immigration by supporting President Obama but saying that the only lasting solution is congressional action. And on Keystone, she has been missing in action.

And if that weren’t enough, foreign policy—which should be a selling point for the former secretary of state—will be a minefield. The president seemingly has no coherent strategy to deal with Islamic State terrorists in Iraq and Syria, no coherent strategy for dealing with Russian PresidentVladimir Putin ’s bellicosity in Eastern Europe, and no coherent strategy for dealing with the Iranian nuclear program. Regardless of whatever news emerges from the Nov. 24 deadline for a nuclear deal with Iran, this story will drag on for ages, as the mullahs would prefer.

All of these foreign-policy dead zones have roots in Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, when she logged hundreds of thousands of miles without alighting on any significant successes. The Republican takeover of the Senate may bring fresh attention to her role in the deadly debacle in Benghazi, Libya, with victims that included U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens.

With President Obama now courting a constitutional crisis over his unilateral action on immigration reform, the Democratic Party is losing popularity by the day. The pressure is on Mrs. Clinton to separate herself from the partisan polarization and dysfunction in Washington while not alienating the liberal Democrats who dominate turnout in presidential primaries. She needs to distance herself from Mr. Obama without alienating his strongest supporters, but she also needs to develop a clear reason and logic for why she should be elected president—a logic that six years after she first declared her candidacy remains more elusive than ever.

Barack Obama could end up beating Hillary Clinton yet again.

Mr. Schoen, who served as a pollster for President Bill Clinton, is the author, with Melik Kaylan, of “The Russia-China Axis: The New Cold War and America’s Crisis of Leadership” (Encounter Books, 2014). Mr. Caddell served as a pollster for PresidentJimmy Carter 

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7 comments:

  1. Yawn. A week in politics is an eternity and this article is simply ridiculous. I read plenty of prognostication pieces when the Republicans got whipped in 06 purporting plenty of good things for Democrats and what I felt at the time was that Americans were simply unhappy with Bush. This article is nothing more than filler. It does highlight a point thought.

    Americans voters are just plain stupid. They go to polls all pissed off and bitter and use their vote as the equivalent of standing outside the capital with their middle finger extended toward the houses of congress. A very small group who actually shows up to vote knows something about the issues, but most are so bitterly partisan that they will vote for a candidate who does not agree with them as long as that candidate is from the right party. Voters on the left are just as bad if not worse than the most ignorant stereotypical hick from a red state. Compared to Clinton, Elizabeth Warren IS a communist, but to me, it's just an example of how far to the right the Democrats have gone which of course is laughable to today's alleged conservatives who look at the real Reagan today as a Democrat at best. Bill Maher said it perfectly last Friday, "We should just allow the illegal immigrants the right to vote because voting is another job American's don't want to do"

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    1. Max you have to stop getting your hard news from Maher. If you consider the few remaining dems to be centrists, or on the right,,,well,,welcome to fantasy island boss.

      MAHER: "I'm bringing this up because this guy, Jonathan Gruber, he's an M.I.T. professor who worked on the Obama health care plan. Big controversy because they found a tape of him basically saying that the American people are stupid because he -- a lot of tapes -- because what he was saying to get the bill passed we had to do a lot of sleight of hand or else they would not have voted for it. If we called it a "tax" -- even though it was a tax -- you have to basically slip a pill in the dog's food in a piece of ham to get the dog to eat the pill. I agree, and I've heard nobody else in America say that. Everybody on the left and the right: "Oh, how could he call American's stupid? Jonathan Gruber, you have met your soulmate. How is this even controversial, I have no idea."

      Remember Max, it was only the house and senate dems that voted for Obamacare, not one repub, and certainly not the average citizen. Seems that only the elected democrat representatives fit Maher's definition as being "Stupid dogs."

      Of course you share Jonathan Gruber's disdain for the average American voter. While I believe that the 60-70% of American's that don't regularly exercise their voting duty as somewhat ill educated I don't share your opinion that those who pull the lever are stupid. Fickle maybe, but not stupid. As your hero Slick Willie used to say, it's the economy stupid. Voters will vote their empty food bowls, and empty pocket books.

      The authors of the title piece, Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, happen to be democrat pollsters. In their opinion, and you already know I share it, HRC is in serious trouble. Liz Warren could be shaping up to be the next McGovern or Dukakis in 2016.

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    2. By the metric of people like yourself, William, everyone is a communist, so it's not like we can have an objective discussion about what the Democratic party stands for. Clinton, along with plenty of Democrat support, signed off on NAFTA as well as the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Democrats, like Republicans, are owned outright by the likes of Goldman and the rest of the Wall Street crowd. Warren, to me, sounds like a Democrat. Hillary? Not so much. With the exception of spearheading and passing the Affordable Care Act, I don't see a massive difference in how Obama has operated compared to Bush. Ball busting aside, I fully understand why anyone right of center will laugh their ass off and go into mocking laughter histrionics. It doesn't change my opinion.

      As for the stupidity, I don't need Bill Maher's monologue to tell me America voters are stupid. The signs are everywhere. 36% of the electorate showed up to vote in mid terms and I'm supposed to believe the 65% who didn't show up are fucking geniuses? Nope. I don't buy it. As for those that do vote, any hack with a video camera could show up a Republican or Democratic event and ask simple questions about the opposing candidate and get hours of video of idiots standing there stammering about what they don't know. Voters in America, except for those who are very wealthy, have been voting against their interests for quite some time.

      I'm no fan of Hillary really. I'd much rather see Jim Webb, Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders up there.

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    1. Boehner has announced that he is ready to appoint members to the Special Committee to continue the Benghazi investigation. Trouble is, the committee no longer exists, but looks like it is immortal. After millions of dollars and 7 or more inquiries the political charade continues.

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    2. Mick, where was President Obama during the Benghazi firefight? Why won't the White House answer this simple question? Can you answer that question?

      I guarantee when Representative Gowdy finishes this investigation we will know this answer.

      Why won't the White House release our President's college transcripts?

      What are BO and HRC hiding? Were they gun running arms into Syria
      through Turkey? I recall the media stink over Iran Contra. Where is our vaunted media concerning these questions?

      Our president has put us into another seven trillion dollars in debt and counting. Stop poor mouthing a few million dollars for this properly run investigation.

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    3. William you ever been to the Dollar Tree? Yeah everything is only a dollar but if you buy enough of it you can run up quite a bill.
      What is this now a few million 8-9-10 times. it adds up. And we get the same result over and over again. Where was the President? Besides the fact that it doesn't matter as he had already weighed in on the matter given his direction and moved on to the next of the 46 individual crises that were aflame that night it is not his duty as I have said before to sit next to the radio in direct communication with Benghazi. The President is the CEO of the country. I deal with the same situation everyday. The CEO passes down orders/information and I do the heavy lifting to get it done.

      Caspar Weinberger:

      When asked about Beirut Weinberger said:

      Well, that’s one of my saddest memories. I was not persuasive enough to persuade the President that the Marines were there on an impossible mission. They were very lightly armed. They were not permitted to take the high ground in front of them or the flanks on either side. They had no mission except to sit at the airport, which is just like sitting in a bull’s eye. Theoretically, their presence was supposed to support the idea of disengagement and ultimate peace. I said, “They’re in a position of extraordinary danger. They have no mission. They have no capability of carrying out a mission, and they’re terribly vulnerable.” It didn’t take any gift of prophecy or anything to see how vulnerable they were.

      Weinberger pleaded with the President to put the Marines back on their transports off shore. Reagan finally listened 241 lost lives later.
      Then he invaded Grenada and cut and ran from Lebanon under the cover of that action.

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