That’s Hot Air’s paraphrase of a New York magazine story’s headline, which asks, “Is Hillary Clinton Any Good At Running For President? And how much does it matter, anyway?” Here’s more from New York:
Academics partial to this analysis will grant that, say, Obama could rally a crowd better than Mitt Romney, or that Bill Clinton could at least appear to feel a person’s pain more than either Bob Dole or George H.W. Bush. But every nominated candidate for president since 1972, when Democrats lost their collective minds and put up George McGovern, has been highly competent (and each winner has had deficiencies that would likely have been more memorable had he lost). “No one thinks John Kerry or Mitt Romney were good candidates,” says Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan, “but they both came very close to winning the presidency.” This is a testament to the elites in both the Democratic and Republican parties, who are always partial to nominees that are capable and electable. “They’re not going to put up someone just because they like and trust them,” says David Karol, a University of Maryland political scientist and co-author of The Party Decides. “There’s a baseline they have to clear. They have to be able to win.” It may take countless debates; the winnowing process of the primary may be torture; but, with rare exceptions, the loons always lose. “Ask Howard Dean” — the antiwar Vermont governor who briefly set the Democratic rank and file’s hearts afire in 2004 before the party elites smacked him down — “if electability concerns matter,” says Nyhan.
So is this a head fake from New York magazine to lull the GOP into a sense of complacency? I don’t think so. Compare the comment above from Nyhan that “No one thinks John Kerry or Mitt Romney were good candidates,” with what Evan Thomas, then-assistant managing editor of the then-Washington Post-owned Newsweek was saying in July of 2004 was saying about his fellow Democrats with bylines — and note the insanely-biased propaganda being churned out at the time:
On Inside Washington, a weekend discussion show taped at and run by the Gannett-owned CBS affiliate in Washington, DC, WUSA-TV, and carried by many PBS stations across the country, Thomas pointed out the boost to the Kerry/Edwards ticket provided by the press corps:
“There’s one other base here: the media. Let’s talk a little media bias here. The media, I think, wants Kerry to win. And I think they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards — I’m talking about the establishment media, not Fox, but — they’re going to portray Kerry and Edwards as being young and dynamic and optimistic and all, there’s going to be this glow about them that some, is going to be worth, collectively, the two of them, that’s going to be worth maybe 15 points.” The week’s Newsweek, dated July 19, certainly backs up Thomas’ contention. Over a smiling picture on the cover of Kerry and Edwards, Newsweek ever hopefully asks: “The Sunshine Boys?”
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Newsweek’s competitor, Time, also gushed about the Democratic ticket, dubbing them, in the headline over their story, “The Gleam Team.”
No, I’d say this is a case of New York magazine sending up the smoke signals that decode as “Run, Elizabeth, Run!”
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And of course, whatever signals New York has been sending to the Hillary campaign, you can be sure someone else is reading them as well:
“The name Clinton right on the email handle meant this was not a difficult find,” Schindler said. “We should assume Russians, Chinese and others were seeing this.”
That’s from Investor’s Business Daily, which notes that “Hillary Clinton’s Private Server A Foreign Spy Magnet.”
To be fair though, she was Secretary of State of a team that promised to be “the most transparent administration, ever….”
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