"Democrats See No Choice but Hillary Clinton in 2016"---but,others see problems.

Democrats See No Choice but Hillary Clinton in 2016

By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE, JONATHAN MARTIN and MAGGIE HABERMANMARCH 11, 2015


Congressional Democrats are counting on a strong Clinton campaign to help lift them back into the majority. Party leaders at all levels want her fund-raising help and demographic appeal. And from the top of the party to its grass roots, Mrs. Clinton’s pseudo-incumbency is papering over significant disadvantages: a weak bench, a long-term House minority and a white middle class defecting to the Republican Party faster than the Democrats’ hoped-for demographic future is expected to arrive.

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Perhaps more significantly, Mrs. Clinton’s long-looming candidacy has acted as a powerful unifying force in the Democratic Party.

Her broad appeal among Democratic voters has prevented liberal complaints against the party’s Wall Street faction from mushrooming into an electoral insurgency. Her star power — and the potential for a ceiling-breaking White House victory — has helped obscure a vexing reality for the post-Obama Democratic Party: As much as it advertises itself as the party of a rising generation, the Democrats’ farm team is severely understaffed, and many of its leading lights are eligible for Social Security.

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Mrs. Clinton’s undisputed fund-raising prowess has also overshadowed financial problems for the national Democratic Party and liberal groups supporting it.

The Democratic National Committee, largely neglected by Mr. Obama, has steadily raised less money than its Republican counterpart over the last two years. The party chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, is unpopular in the White House and locked in a vicious feud with one of the party’s big donors. And while conservative outside groups are on track to raise more than $1 billion during the 2016 cycle, the main Democratic “super PAC,” Priorities USA Action, is still struggling to secure more than a handful of million-dollar commitments from big donors.

Mrs. Clinton, most Democrats believe, is the solution. No other candidate combines her ties to big donors with her appeal to small ones. Liberal activists are hostile to the party’s second-best big-dollar fund-raiser, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York; business donors are suspicious of the party’s other popular small-donor draw, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Even before Mrs. Clinton’s recent problems, a few Democrats had openly fretted about their party’s dependence on her. Deval Patrick, a former Massachusetts governor and an Obama supporter in 2008, said he “felt badly” for Mrs. Clinton and believed that voters would ultimately care about more substantive issues than her BlackBerry use.

But it might be better, Mr. Patrick suggested, for someone — anyone — to give Mrs. Clinton a run for her money. “My view of the electorate is, we react badly to inevitability, because we experience it as entitlement, and that is risky, it seems to me, here in America,” Mr. Patrick said. “I want Democrats to win.”

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