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Carville: Hillary Can Win in 2008
It used to be accepted political wisdom that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton had a lock on the 2008 Democratic nomination.
But support for Hillary by left-wing activists in the party has all but eroded.
In an apparent effort to win back the McGovern wing of the party, James Carville is out with a new column in the Washington Post.
Co-authored with Democratic pollster Mark J. Penn, Carville has penned "The Power of Hillary.”
In their article, the top Democratic strategists claim, "We don't know whether Hillary will run" - but quickly add: "But we do know that if she runs, she can win."
Carville served as the chief strategist in Bill Clinton's 1992 and 1996 campaigns, and Penn was a key strategist in both the 1996 Clinton presidential campaign and Hillary's 2000 Senate campaign.
The duo argues that despite Hillary’s high negatives, she can still win the White House in 2008.
They also note that the same negativism permeated the air when Hillary ran for Senate in 2000.
"Just give someone else a chance, so we in the Democratic Party can elect a Democrat" and "She cannot possibly win" were two mantras heard six years ago, "when many pundits - and Democrats - said there was no way that Hillary could get elected to the Senate. She won by 12 percentage points."
If Hillary does run for president just two years from now, the two argue, "she can win that race, too."
Despite being labeled as one of the most divisive individuals in U.S. politics and a sure loser because of her high negatives among voters, Hillary has a lot going for her, Carville and Penn insist.
They cite these reasons:
"Adversaries spent $60 million against her in 2000, and she endured press scrutiny that would have wilted most candidates. She gave as good as she got, and she triumphed," they say, adding that she is "the only nationally known Democrat (other than her husband) who has weathered the Republican assaults and emerged with a favorable rating above 50 percent (54 percent positive in the latest Post-ABC poll)."
Discounting her 42 percent negative rating, they argue that so do other nationally known Democrats. "All the nationally known Democrats would likely wind up with high negative ratings, too," they say, "once they'd been through the Republican attack machine."
Hillary, they say, can win back the "swing voters," including women, won by President Bush in 2004.
"Certainly she could win the states John Kerry did," they predict. The "pathbreaking possibility of this country's first female president" could create "an explosion of women voting Democratic. States that were close in the past, from Arkansas to Colorado to Florida to Ohio, could well move to the Democratic column." After all, they write, one more state added to those won by Kerry would mean a Democrat victory.
Hillary, Carville and Penn argue, "represents the kind of change the country is yearning for: a smart, strong leader" who "would take the country in a fundamentally different direction. She would close deficits, not widen them; expand health-care coverage, not shrink it; and fight terrorism without isolating us from the rest of the world." Editor's note:
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