Ezra Klein‘s sympathetic item on Clinton and polarization is a bit surprising to me, given the way he chafed when I argued the exact same thing last February:
It is true that Clinton has high unfavorable ratings among the voting public. But those who think some other candidate would be less objectionable are confusing cause and effect, and unfairly attributing to the lone woman in the race what is common to most well-known Democratic figures. High unfavorable ratings are a product of having a national profile in a divided nation with a pugnacious, mudslinging political culture. The same February Washington Post-ABC poll that showed Hillary Clinton with a 48 percent unfavorable rating showed her husband, one of America’s most beloved ex-presidents, with a 42 percent one. Fantasy presidential candidate and Oscar-winning environmental film star Al Gore had a 48 percent unfavorable rating in Rasmussen Reports’ December 2006 survey, and former presidential nominee John Kerry’s was at 53 percent. All national Democrats who seriously contend for power become polarizing figures who attract hateful independent-expenditure groups, vicious “exposés,” and unending negative scrutiny from powerful conservative media outlets.
The good news is that candidates can succeed when they learn how to ride the whirlwind. In June 1992, candidate Bill Clinton had an unfavorable rating of 47 percent, according to a Times Mirror survey — nearly identical to what his wife’s is today. He managed to reduce that dramatically come fall (as his wife will need to) and win the election. Similarly, Gore had a 43 percent unfavorable rating in April 1999, according to a Pew Research Center survey, but managed to knock that down to the mid-30s by October 2000 and win the popular vote in November.
I’m glad to see that this, like so much else I’ve written about Clinton in the past, has finally become the conventional wisdom. Perhaps I can also get some props now for correctly predicting that women would flock to Clinton and that the support from this group would allow her to avoid negative consequences from her 2002 Iraq War vote? In the last ABC News-Washington Post poll, Clinton had a 42 percent lead over Obama (57 to 15 percent) among Democratic women.
This has been a very difficult year for me as a blogger, in that it is extremely painful to be a) too far ahead of the curve, at which point you bear the brunt of angry resistance to your new idea and b) an expert on women in politics issues in an environment where about four percent of readers and other bloggers had anything nice to say about Clinton. And so it is with some relief wanted to do anything but attack me for writing what has since proven to be an accurate analysis of the political situation on the Democratic side.
–Garance Franke-Ruta