To even ask the question is to be assaulted by the rolling eyes of a thousand respectable political commentators. “Of course, she’s electable,” our generic pundit avers, without making much of an effort to disguise his irritation. “She’s Hillary Clinton.” Well, yes, that’s certainly not debatable. The former first lady, New York senator, and secretary of state has harbored thinly-veiled presidential ambitions for over a quarter century, and she has geared her career toward making the most of this – her – moment. The conventional wisdom inside political circles suggests that the greatest threat to Hillary Clinton’s viability as a presidential candidate, her unorthodox “homebrew” email system, is survivable. That determination might be rooted in little more than the knowledge that the Clintons have a proven ability to evade crippling scandals – it is certainly not founded on any objective assessment of her capacity to defuse the nearly year-old controversy. The burden to prove Clinton’s national electoral viability is a modest one, and not merely because of her long history in public life but (perhaps unduly) because of her husband’s gravitas and success in the White House. If, however, pundits were evaluating Hillary Clinton, as are voters, it’s not clear that there would be a consensus that she is an electable presidential candidate.
“Withheld Clinton emails contain ‘operational’ intel, put lives at risk,” read the headline via Fox News reporters Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne. The report detailed the accusations of one government official, speaking on condition of anonymity to these reporters, warned that “operational intelligence” obtained via vulnerable human assets was imperiled by Clinton’s callous disregard for national security in consideration for the privileges to which she had become accustomed as a member of Congress. Moreover, the assets abroad who provided American operators with that intelligence were compromised, which threatened the lives of those assets and has now made recruiting similar informants that much more difficult.
This revelation follows an equally damaging report that indicated the State Department will decline to release portions of 22 documents recovered from Clinton’s server because they were classified “Top Secret.” The release of the information contained therein was dubbed potentially “too damaging” to American national interests if they were to be revealed to the public.
This is extremely damaging to Clinton’s electoral prospects. It boils her email scandal down to one easily digested and brutally determinative conclusion: She jeopardized American interests and imperiled American national security repeatedly and for years. There is a reason why Clinton has sought to muddy the waters by contending that all the confidential correspondence she received was not marked as such at the time or that Colin Powell also had a private email address, as though this tidbit was at all relevant. Her aim was always to ensure that voters never reached that extremely deadly serious conclusion that Clinton’s sense of “convenience” was more important to her than U.S. foreign policy priorities.
For all of Clinton’s contentions that Donald Trump might be making it harder for U.S. operators to recruit and work with covert assets overseas, Clinton is almost certainly guilty of precisely the same offense.
That’s not the only dubious parallel between Trump and Clinton. Political observers have no difficulty reading surveys that show Trump is among the most disliked candidates running for the White House in 2016, but few have observed Clinton earns runner-up status. In fact, the two candidates are pretty similar in their ability to repel prospective general election voters.
According to a December Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, Clinton is viewed positively by 37 percent of respondents compared to 48 percent who view her negatively. Only Jeb Bush and Donald Trump performed worse. A Pew Research Center survey conducted over a week in early January confirmed these results. While 35 percent said that Clinton would make a “great” or “good” president, 44 percent said she’d be a “poor” or “terrible” commander-in-chief. A national Quinnipiac University poll conducted in December found that 60 percent of respondents do not think Clinton is trustworthy – including a majority of independents, men, women, college and non-college educated voters, and all age ranges. Only 46 percent of voters said they believed Clinton “cares” about people like them. No matter how the Democratic primary race unfolds, if Clinton emerges as the party’s nominee, she will begin the general election campaign in a ditch from which her party must dig her out.
Pro-Clinton Democrats might console themselves with the perfectly valid observation that Republicans are in the midst of a civil struggle that won’t be resolved soon. Moreover, an increasingly likely outcome of the primary process might be the nomination of the most unelectable Republican since Barry Goldwater. If, however, the Republican Party starts acting like a disciplined national political institution soon, all that hope will more closely resemble self-delusion. Is Hillary Clinton a viable presidential candidate only so long as Republicans shoot themselves in their collective foot? Well, at least it’s a strategy.
