Hillary In 2016????????

Toby Harnden is the British Telegraph's American correspondent and he's normally fairly astute, but here I have to wonder what he's been smoking when he says that the smart money is on Hillary Clinton for 2016:

Having elected Barack Obama amid near national euphoria, America is experiencing something akin to buyer's remorse.

Obama's popularity is the lowest of any American president at the end of his first year in office since polling began. Yet as his approval ratings have nose-dived, those of his Secretary of State have curved elegantly upwards.

A recent poll by the Clarus Research Group found that Hillary Clinton had a 75 per cent approval rating compared to 51 per cent for the man who defeated her in their epic battle for the Democratic nomination. {...}

[Mrs. Clinton]now finds herself ideally placed to succeed Mr Obama or, in the increasingly plausible scenario that he becomes a one-term president, the Republican who ousts him in 2012.

During the past year, Mrs Clinton has done just what she did when she entered the Senate in 2001 - knuckled down to the hard grind of policy while building relationships with wary sceptics.

The woman who was one of the most polarising figures in American politics now has a glowing 65 per cent approval rating among Independents and healthy 57 per cent among Republicans.

Even sworn enemies on the Right marvelled at her toughness in refusing to concede to Obama until the bitter end in the summer of 2008 and now view her as more hawkish than the president.

Mrs Clinton, moreover, has lived in Arkansas and won over conservatives in upstate New York as well as trouncing Obama in states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania - establishing a connection with Middle America that has eluded the president.

This is the sort of thing that happens when foreigners attempt to judge America and Americans by their own norms, and Brits are usually more susceptible to this fallacy than most.

'Clarus Research'? Perhaps if I see something from Rasmussen I might treat it with more credibility. That 51% rating for Prez Zero is a dead giveaway, when Rasmussen and NBC have him at 46% and 47% approval ratings, respectively.

Even assuming Mrs. Clinton's approval ratings are anything near what Harnden claims, that's largely because she's been out of the public eye, since Barack Obama put most of the crucial departments of her office under czars, special envoys and advisers and she's been essentially relegated to being a messenger girl. Far from dealing with what Harnden calls 'the hard grind of policy' she's been placed totally out of the loop.Put her back in the public eye again and her negatives would resurface like an outbreak of the plague, especially since she's associated with the Obama Administration's poisonous policies even though she's had very little input in formulating them.

And that brings us to another problem with Harnden's analysis that deals with something he appears to not be aware of.

Mrs. Clinton did not 'lose' the 2008 Democrat nomination. In fact, she won the primaries in the large US states quite handily. What actually happened is that the 'super-delegates', made of Democrat party pols and influential figures peddlers not attached to any state delegations awarded the nomination to Barack Obama to avoid angering Obama's supporters on the Far Left and more importantly, alienating one of the few reliable constituencies the Democrats have left - the Black vote.

That's why it's doubtful that she would be able to challenge Obama in 2012( assuming he runs again) or be able to run successfully in 2016. Because to do that, she'd have to somehow divorce herself from the Obama Administration's policies, which would mean criticizing him - and losing a fair amount of her base.

As for her supposed connection with Middle America, perhaps Toby Harnden needs to speak to some of its denizens and get a clue as to how they view Mrs. Clinton. It's not pretty.

If she manages to get the nomination and run in 2012, all the things Middle America has always disliked about her are going to surface with a vengeance. And after four years of Obama, another Left wing ideologue running as a Democrat an dtainted by an association with Obama is going to have a real job making the sale if she's pitted against any kind of reasonable candidate.

We may very well have our first female president in 2012,but if I were a betting man there's a certain very fast filly from the Far North I'd put my money on to win.

That particular thoroughbred has already shown us she runs very well against the odds, and if she's in the race I think she takes it going away.