Hillary Clinton Is Immune to "Swiftboating"

This is how Republicans play presidential elections, ever since Lee Atwater, and some would say all the way back to Tricky Dick himself: they try to define their opponent before their opponent defines himself.

Witness George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry.

Each was portrayed as a variation on a theme: a half baked, unpatriotic, dovish tax and spender whose election would mean great danger for our country and our security.

Atwater, Rove and others accomplished this task by exploiting and distorting policy positions, but even more important, distorting the personality quirks of their opponents.

Gore, in their twisted version of his public persona became a dishonest, exaggerating weirdo, who invented the internet and perpetrated financial scams with Tibetan monks.

Kerry became an out of touch Boston Brahmin with an alarmingly shrill wife, who hated the military and lied about his own service to rack up non deserved medals.

We all have witnessed this crap the GOP slings for the last thirty years.

The only politician who fought back effectively against this smear machine was Bill Clinton. Richard Melon Scaife and Co., along with Jerry Falwell and ilk, smeared both Bill and Hillary as liars, cheats, frauds and even drug running murderers. The Clintons both fought back, fiercely and successfully. They denied the Republicans the ability to define them; instead, they defined themselves to the American people, to such an extent that the public actually stayed on board with both Bill and Hillary when it was revealed that he was stupid enough to cheat on his wife.

The Republicans will try their same game in '08. It is the only way they know how to win elections.

Except this time, they have a big, big problem. They have already spent sixteen years trying to define and redefine Hillary for public consumption. Very little of it has stuck. And to make matters worse, she is already defined for the country. She was a constant presence on our television screens for eight years as First Lady. We watched as she fought to keep her marriage together. We watched as she won the Senate seat in NY and then proceeded to surprise everyone with her diligence and intellect.

The American people already know who and what Hillary Clinton is. For the GOP, it's "the boy who cried wolf" syndrome. Anything new they throw at her will be greeted with an enormous yawn by the electorate. Sure, the Republicans hate her and the liberal base of the Democratic party is not wild about her as the nominee, but the middle of the electorate - that 20% that decides elections already knows who she is.

The Republicans know all this and it scares them to death, because it deprives them of the one thing they know how to do to win elections: redefine a fairly unknown opponent in very negative terms. They can't do that with Hillary and it's giving them nightmares.

They have already beaten them with that game plan.

That middle 20% of the electorate is the fence sitters, the Reagan Democrats, the unformed and uninformed who are most easily swayed by the slick advertising of the corporate candidates. You are pinning your hopes on those who vote not on principle, but on whim. They will vote for whoever yells loudest and longest.

If Hillary is the nominee, we will see an unleashing of venom that will make the swiftboad attacks look like a Hallmark card. And that 20% WILL believe them. It's what they do.

Oh, wait we won both those elections.

And we had a war room that responded fiercely and instantaneously to Republican smears. And we had a candidate that knew how to deftly counter attack.

And the same war room is now in place to attack Republican smears and defend Hillary from whatever they sling at her.

The 20% believes whomever fights the hardest, the longest, the most effectively and with the greatest skill.

The Clinton track record, if you include her Senate runs, is 4-0. So the odds are your analysis is way off base.

back last fucking week. And in the 6 years that Clinton held office after losing congress we handed the repubs everything they asked for. NAFTA, 'welfare reform', no raise in the minimum wage -- all a repub had to do to get into office was mention Clinton's name. The DLC had us running to the right, chasing republican votes while abandoning the democrats.

Some fucking success.

Do you really remember the 90s?

Even now, we see the same thing - marginalizing the democratic base to reach to the right. She's the most hawkish of the candidates, when 70% of the country is against the war. She speaks of universal health coverage instead of universal healthcare.

Hillary is not Bill. She has nowhere near his political instincts. Witness her slaps at Obama, which resulted in taking a position on nukes which is 180 degrees from what she said just a couple years ago.

She's being primed for a big fall.

balanced budgets, the country at peace, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, environmental protection/responsible regulation, a FEMA that actually works, an FDA that does what it's supposed to do, a Justice department that is independent from even its own President, women having safe contraceptive care and pregnancy options, gay people being an actual political force that is listened to, restoring respect for our country around the globe -

then by all means, diss the Clinton presidency. Of course, HIllary will not, if elected, govern exactly the way some on the left want her to govern. But, she will govern center-left, which for many of us is just fine.

I remember the 90's very well. Apparently you remember them through an anti Bill Clinton prism where everything he did was rightwing and wrong. I think most people would disagree with your assessment of his Presidency. And I think history will, too.

Guess who ranked first.

You would have been one of the people on the dock where the Titanic was launching selling me tickets and saying the boat was unsinkable...

Hillary Clinton is already defined...and more than half the country hates her or will never vote for her. The Republicans are not scared to death about the possibility of her nomination...they want it!

Keep your Titanic ticket...no thanks.

You are kidding with this, right? Of all of our candidates, NONE have the (R) inspired baggage of Hillary. They don't need 'new', they just need reruns.

decided to vote AGAINST her.The very fact that public opinion has already been formed makes that number difficult to change.Hillary is still a polarizing figure that many Americans do not like.She surprised no one with her "diligence and intellect" Hillary has been known as "intelligent" and hardworking since she was in college. The perception of her as cold, manipulative and power hungry has not changed.It is really tough to banish a power hungry image when you are running for President.
Hillary was never the beneficiary of the warm fuzzies the electorate gave her husband.From the very beginning the electorate responded to allegations that she was an "intrusive "co-president" and rejected her as "pushy" and "manipulative". Her one moment of popularity was when the public stood by her during the Lewinsky matter, as they sympathized with the betrayed wife. In part that is what helped her win the NY senate seat as many women were outraged when her male opponent attempted to "bully" her into signing a "pledge" and that moment turned the campaign against him in support of a women they thought had been through enough.
Those sympathies do not exist today.Somehow Hillary's loyalty to her husband is being twisted into something cynical.
The Republicans are not afraid of Hillary.They have been promoting her this time around as in an election in which a Democrat is virtually assured of victory, Hillary is the one that can be beaten.

I couldn't agree with this post more. Well done! This is one of the main reasons I'm supporting Hillary in '08. Yes she has warts, but America knows all of them, and even if they try something new (they will) I'm confident the new war room will return fire with more force. Just imagine for a moment what will happen to Obama and especially Edwards when the slime machine is through with them. Obama will be barrack HUSSEIN obama, the jihadist who attended madrassas as a child (hell, in the south they'll just say he still attends a madrassa and those clowns will eat it up).

The attack on Edwards will make him wish all he did was go windsurfing with John Kerry. He will no longer be known as John Edwards, but will become "The Breck Girl" complete with comercials. He'll be pounded over and over about his 28k sq ft mansion, $1000 haircuts, and his work as...god forbid... a TRIAL LAWYER!!!!!!!!!! They'll make his wife into a monster for not giving up the campaign to be with her family in the face of a serious illness. Face it, the Repugs have even fewer issues to run on than they've had in the past. It's going to be all crap all the time, and Hillary & Co. have proven they can take a punch and deliver a swift kick in the crotch in return.

***Just to make clear... these are NOT my opinions of Obama and Edwards (both are fine men and would make great Presidents) but you all know that these would be just some of the lines of attack if either were the nominee, and I'm not sure either would fight back effectively.

Are they going to cower in a corner and cry like babies?

Support your candidate because of his/her positions and DON'T make the assumptions that they're going to sit like a sack of potatoes while being attacked.

It is worth remembering: the bad guys can't win unless they A) cheat, and/or B) lie and distort. Either way, they're sleeping with Satan, and we're not.

is a plus? The public does already know who she is. True. But is that necessarily a good thing?

The country is on to them, none of the Democratic candidates would even show up at their
last soiree.

Not even their leadership, which includes the junior senator from New York.

... for any of the candidates can construct a similar argument as to why their person can't be beaten by the Republics.

That statement is not in any way intended to disagree or cut down with what you said. I think your analysis is very good and pretty much on target.

I also think it isn't unique to HRC. The specifics of it, of course, are unique. The overall notion that she's unswiftboatable isn't.

By the way. My strongest sentiment about all of this is that she and damned few others will fight tough and hard no matter what gets thrown at them. I only fear that her team may lose a sense of proportionality and overplay any advantage they have.

so successfully that almost half of U.S. voters will not vote for her no matter who the Republicans run.

She cannot possibly overcome that. Nobody could.

They said the same thing about Bill Clinton in '91-'92. He had similar negative #'s. Hillary has run a great campaign so far, and I don't expect that to change. I feel she and her team are without a doubt the best equipped to wage the type of campaign that is coming. In the fantasy land that I think some DUers live in... Kucinich will one day be President. In the real world, you have to fight fire with fire, and neither Edwards (am I the only one who remembers his ineffective VP run?) or Obama (Mitt Romney of all people mocking him for his tap dancing foreign policy performance this past week... Mitt Romney!!!).

Bill had no negatives in 91/92 because nobody knew him in 91/92. He was just a small state governor who did not inhale and protested Vietnam in London. That was the sum total that 98% of the country knew about him.

Maybe you misunderstand what is meant by 'having negatives'. In poll-speak that is the numbers of people who declare they will vote against a candidate, no matter who that candidate is running against. Positives can easily go up, but negatives seldom go down significantly at all. Hillary's negatives are somewhere between 40-45%. Even if you go with the lower number, that mean the republicans only need to pick up an additional 11% of the general vote to win. Assume a MOE of 3% and a vote fraud factor of 5%, that leaves them with only 3% of the vote to pick up. Any halfway decent smear campaign at the last minute could give them 3%.

If she runs, she loses. She cannot overcome having a 40% negative coming out of the gate.

In June, 1992, Bill Clinton was the presumptive nominee. He was very well known to most Americans. They had seen him run his primary campaign, watched the Jennifer Flowers scandal unfold in relentless television coverage, seen both him and Hillary on Sixty Minutes in one of the highest rated episodes in history and watched him virtually clinch the nomination of his party. He had been on the cover of both Time and Newsweek. Here is the rundown on his favorable/unfavorable ratings during that time:

In April 1992, only 26 percent of voters had a favorable view of Bill Clinton, while 40 percent viewed him unfavorably, according to a Times/CBS poll.

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.

After Mr. Clinton won the nomination and after his convention, his favorable rating began to rise. By October 1992, his ratings had become about even, with 34 percent favorable and 35 percent unfavorable.



http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=08&year=2007&base_name=post_4591

in 91 (as the poster stated)?

Any candidate will have high negatives in the heat of the general election - obviously, because the opposing party is lined up against him. But here we have Hillary at 40%+ negatives and the primary is still nine months off. This isn't a fluctuation that reflects the electoral season. This is a hard core of anti-Clinton voters that she will never touch. As the Hillary supporters keep saying, she is a known quantity - minds are already made up. Negatives like this are not transitory.

The fact is, people did not know Clinton. All they knew were some stories, and as those stories were dealt with, handled by his innate political skills, he could reduce the temporary negatives the stories created.

But people know Hillary. Nothing she says or does is going to reduce her negatives because they are based on long standing knowledge, not stories that pop up in the media. And as long as she comes up with crap like using nukes against Osama, she will increase those negatives among progressives while not reducing them with republicans. So you've got the right convinced that she's a socialist, and the left certain that she's a corporatist tool. That leaves only the middle, and as Jim Hightower says, the only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armidillos.

Bill didn't have a decade and a half of his life being picked apart by the (R) machine leading up to the election. People didn't know a thing about him other than he was charasmatic and from Arkansas. That means starting with a neutral position and taking it up the hill.

Hillary has to overcome her baggage. She isn't not starting on level footing with the other candidates. She is in a ditch and needs to crawl UP to a neutral position to even look at that hill.

I am not saying that she can't overcome it, but don't underestimate damage already done and the immense amount of work/energy it will take to undo it.

the first dramatic exposure the country had to him was the Jennifer Flowers episode. He was already WIDELY despised by the Republicans, who loathed him in Arkansas and feared his electability as a Southern moderate. See the post in this thread detailing his favorable/unfavorable ratings during 1992. They mirror Hillary's today.

He started with a national neutral and got drug through the mud.

She is starting in the mud.

Let's just say he was not Obama! The other big exposure was a big cover story in the NYT magazine that was extremely positive about him and Hillary. Both of these 2 things identified him as a potential superstar in the Democratic party.

He and Hillary are not fighting the same race - he was up against a President with ratings in the low 40s and who was being bashed by a third party candidate. He also had more of media behind him than Bush did.

Let's learn what the term means. It was against a war hero, by lying about his medals. It was done against Murtha and Patrick Murphy. They're trying to go after Jon Stolz at Votevets.org. Swiftboating is about vets opposed to wars. Hillary is not in this category.

Hillary is our chicken hawk!

so it doesn't matter whether she can withstand a swift boating attempt or not.

What I'm looking forward to most is Terry "The Big T" McAuliffe quarterbacking another presidential election. His 'rope-a-dope' strategy with Kerry would have totally worked if the election had been held in August of 2004; Bush would have long since punched himself out, and all Kerry would have had to have done was push him over!

I'm also looking forward to a mobilized Republican base. If Clinton proved anything, its that so long as you hold the White House, nothing else matters. Down ticket? I can't even find Colorado on the map, let alone care that we were making electoral progress there.

When Bill Clinton ran the first time, it was Bush the lesser with the integrity deficit. The corporate media continued to show his "read my lips, no new taxes" pledge over and over, which he reneged on, this made him a liar with the Republicans and along with the exploding debt and Perot's resulting candidacy split the Republican Party, thereby making it much easier to overlook Clinton's possible escapades and looming "bimbo eruptions" as they were referred to then. Bill Clinton to a large degree and Al Gore to a lesser degree were fresh to the national scene.

When Al Gore ran against Bush the least, whether rightly or wrongly he was attached in large part to Clinton's legacy having served as his loyal Vice President. "The War Against Gore's" integrity by the corporate media began in March of 99, with the "Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet" slander, this was conveniently, just a few weeks after Clinton's impeachment. The Lewinsky Scandal which served to give the corporate media ammunition on a silver platter regarding the issue of integrity only certified in much of middle America's mind, that the other Clinton scandals were true as well. Of course Bill Clinton never ran for an election after the Lewinsky Scandal hit the fan.

This is also why Bush the least ran on "restoring honor and integrity to the White House", even though I believe Rove is a slime bag, he recognized their only option in making the race close enough to steal, with the corporate media's overwhelming support in carrying their talking points.

The corporate media had an inherent motivation to trash and slander Al Gore and that was the realization by them of the threat, a growing Internet would have against their monopoly on information. Information = power, money and influence and they saw this as slipping away, so the trashing Al Gore; the primary champion of the Internet and the camouflaging of Bush the least's obvious shortcomings was all much of America; not connected to the Internet ever heard from them. So even when Al Gore mentioned the successes of the Clinton Administration or spoke of the environment, the corporate media rarely if ever reported it. The reminds me of the tree that falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it.

But I contend, the primary reason the corporate media trashed and slandered Al Gore is because he empowered you and me and virtually everybody else here when he championed the Internet and they never forgave him for it. Ironically, today the same corporate media which waged their eight year witch hunt against the Clinton's integrity, even going so far as to imply they were murderers as you state, now can't promote Hillary Clinton enough. Frankly this whole affair stinks to me, smelling like a back door job to power and this is my biggest problem in ever supporting Hillary Clinton for President.

The Republicans will use that word. They'll use it overtly or through their minions like Coulter and Limbaugh. It's simple. It's memorable. It isn't full of big words like the long elaboration as to why "swiftboating" won't work. (Do you guys seriously believe that regular people will ever read your big blocks of words?)

What's more, Clinton's personal appearance - cold, unfriendly, humorless - conforms very well to what a lot of people think a lesbian looks like. Now you and I are probably sophisticated and know that characterization is a lie. I know a couple of lesbians that don't look like Hillary in the slightest. It doesn't matter. We're not the ones that label was meant for.

And for the record, I don't think Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. But see? What does that matter? Joe Sixpack and his wife Doris Dishrag will believe it, they'll talk it up and Clinton will lose.

I don't like using this as a talking point, but I guess if you think it could be an issue, I will say, I think you're very wrong.

People who wear blinders, wear them all the time.

Used to be kept awake at night thinking the Clintons spent the majority of the eighties running cocaine out of Arkansas and murdering their politic enemies.

That Hillary likes girls will seem a small stretch for the people these adds will be targeted to.

I know car mechanics that are still tying John Kerry to Jane Fonda under a Communist banner. And if you mention the name Hillary Clinton around a laundromat, their responses may lead you to think it was her semen on that blue dress.

See, when you hang around places like DU and Starbuck's cafes, you aren't in real America. The real America is found in dollar stores and filling stations and donut shops, and you get to hear what is said by a representative sample of Americans. And boy, do they hate Clinton - any Clinton. They hate Bush too, but they see no real alternative.

What Democrats need is a candidate who clearly makes a difference and clearly cares for them. If any of the candidates show that - any candidate but Clinton, of course - the light at the end of the tunnel will not be a gorilla with a torch.

They already have. Hillary will have to fight to overcome the public perception of her. That, to me, seems like a weaker position to be in, than being a relatively unknown candidate.

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I agree its hers to lose or win. Massachusetts voters already knew about the swiftboaters.

This is what I've been saying for a long time, only you say it better.

Thank you and have a look at my banner.

Ridicule. A young college geek named Karl Rove practiced it and honed it for years. It's been an actual campaign strategy for about 30 years now. It began with things like "Limousine Liberals" and "The Loony Left" in the 60's to John Kerry's "bandaids" at the Republican convention.
Like schoolyard bullies, Republicans always find a way to make fun of someone and I'm sure that Hillary will be no exception. Veiled misogyny will be very much in evidence, but they'll give it cute names like "Feminazi". I'm sure she's well prepared for the attacks, but make no mistake; there will be plenty of attacks. Just think of the kid in elementary school who bullied you the most. That's the Republican party.