Hillary and the Myth of Clinton Inevitability

The Clintons faced similarly sub-par opposition in the 1992 general election. The Gulf War glow proved to be a mirage

The Clintons faced similarly sub-par opposition in the 1992 general election. The Gulf War glow proved to be a mirage for George H.W. Bush as a devastating recession—and his oblivious public response to it—brought the president’s approval ratings well under 40 percent. Even Tsongas, before he dropped out of the Democratic race, had pulled ahead of Bush in head-to-head match-ups, and the president himself was nearly defeated in the New Hampshire Republican Primary. After 12 years of Reagan-Bush, the country was ready to turn the G.O.P. out. But Bill Clinton’s 43 to 38 percent victory (Ross Perot snagged 19 percent) could likely have been attained by numerous Democrats in 1992.

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The pattern of feeble opposition continued during the Clintons’ White House years.

Consider the good fortune Bill Clinton had in nearly blowing up his presidency in 1993 and 1994, when the only Democrats facing the voters were in Congress, and not in 1995 and 1996, when it was his own name that would be on the ballot.

His bumbling governance led to historic Democratic defeats in the ‘94 mid-term elections, ushering in a Republican Senate for the first time since 1986 and a Republican House for the first time since 1954. Had Bill Clinton been facing the voters that year, he surely would have been run out of office, and decisively. But ‘94 turned into a blessing for Bill Clinton (if not his party), because the voters got their anger at him out of their system and then fell in love with divided government—a G.O.P. Congress to restrain the Democratic president, and vice versa.

In ‘96, against the haplessly dour Bob Dole, Bill Clinton won a passionless re-election campaign with 49 percent of the vote. (Dole took 41 percent, and Perot 8 percent.) At the same time, voters kept the Republicans in control of Congress.

His second term was devoted mostly to political survival. The Lewinsky scandal erupted in January 1998, and for the next year Bill Clinton was forced to subordinate any kind of ambitious domestic agenda to a public relations campaign against Ken Starr and the “vast right-wing conspiracy.” When it was over, he’d won, but he was also a lame duck. And when he and Hillary left the White House in January 2001, the Democratic Party was weaker than it had been in decades, subject, many believed, to permanent minority status. The first Democratic president to win re-election since the Great Depression had done it at his own party’s expense.

Hillary Clinton’s own journey in politics has been propelled by similar forces. She’d never before run for office, but in 2000 she was handed the Democratic Party’s nomination for U.S. Senate in New York, a plum gift for which many politicians spend their entire careers angling—generally in vain. She, too, drew inferior opposition, in her case when Rick Lazio replaced Rudy Giuliani as the Republican standard-bearer. New York’s political demographics took care of the rest: With Al Gore carrying the state over George W. Bush by 25 points, Hillary defeated Lazio by 10.

Re-election in 2006 was never really in doubt, either. Most senators, especially in states where their party enjoys a built-in advantage, can count on winning at least two or three terms in they so desire. Hillary entered the Senate in 2001 determined to earn a reputation for cooperation and not polarization. She doggedly tended to her state’s needs and left her party’s highest profile battles against the Bush administration to other voices.

Against John Spencer in 2006, she broke 60 percent and carried many Republican areas—evidence, her allies claim, of her potential appeal to red state voters. In truth, her showing didn’t prove much. Even Ted Kennedy, perhaps the most polarizing Democrat in America, carried Republican areas of Massachusetts in his 2006 re-election campaign.

Which brings us to the current campaign. Hillary now appears well-positioned for the Democratic nomination, although that’s hardly a shocking feat: She entered this race as the most prohibitive favo
rite since Walter Mondale, and usually wins primaries.

If she does claim the nomination, it’s entirely possible—if not likely—that she’ll win in the fall, simply because the odds strongly favor any Democrat after eight years of George W. Bush. It’s also possible that she’ll lose, and that she’ll turn out to have been a weaker general-election candidate than her remaining opponents.

Hillary Clinton, and her husband, have enjoyed a remarkable string of victories since they first got to the White House. But she is not inevitable.

Hillary and the Myth of Clinton Inevitability