Holmes: Doubts about Hillary
We go through this presidential campaign business every four years, so unless this is your first time around, you shouldn't need to be reminded. But let's say it anyway: Don't believe the polls and don't believe the pundits.
On this date in 2003, a CBS poll gave Wesley Clark the lead for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, followed by Dick Gephardt, Joe Lieberman, Howard Dean and, with 8 percent, John Kerry.
Frontrunners fade and bounce back, challengers gain and lose momentum, and at this stage in the game - months before the first votes are cast, most of what you hear is spin. This race holds surprises we can't imagine. It will get interesting; that's what makes politics fun.
At least let's hope so, because the coronation of Hillary is, at this point, neither interesting nor fun.
For now, the inevitability campaign is working. Hillary isn't making mistakes and her organization seems to be running smoothly. The Clinton campaign has been saying she's inevitable for a long time, and the pundits are parroting the theme. The message is reinforced by the Republicans, who have been using fear of Hillary to fire up their base for at least eight years.
They want to run against Hillary, mostly because they have already accomplished the first task of opposition operatives: They have built up her negatives through years of defining her in voters' minds.
Republican operatives have had great luck over the last few elections by creating caricatures and running against them. Conservative talk radio and late-night comedians turned Gore into a wooden self-aggrandizing geek and John Kerry into a lying anti-war wimp. Kerry has yet to recover from the caricature. Gore has made progress at shaking off his undeserved image but the armies of the right can turn on the ridicule at will.
Hillary may be able to rise above her caricature, if only because it's so old. The image of Hillary as a shrill, radical-liberal, ultra-feminist conniver was created in the early '90s. She's had plenty of time since then to convince anyone with an open mind that there's more to her than that. Her success in New York shows her ability to win over doubters.
But she's got some doubters in her own party as well. They aren't Hillary haters. They are people whose vision of change at the White House goes beyond changing the name on the mailbox from Bush back to Clinton.
They worry first about foreign policy. A few debates ago, Hillary scored points with the pundits by refusing to follow Barack Obama in promising to meet with foreign leaders including Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Cuba's Fidel Castro. But it reminded me that in eight years in the White House, Bill Clinton made no serious effort to change a Cuba policy that has been a failure since the Kennedy administration - mostly, I suspect, because it might have lost him (or Hillary) some Cuban-American votes in Florida.
Bill wanted to look strong on defense matters because he had never served in uniform. Hillary struts like a hawk to compensate for being a woman. So the Hillary doubters among Democrats have to wonder if she'll do something stupid - like launching an unnecessary war, for instance - just to look tough.
After all, isn't that what she did in 2002 when she endorsed Bush's invasion of Iraq?
Some people worry about going back to the White House soap opera days of Bill's second term. Democrat doubters worry about returning to the governing strategy the Clintons chose: the politics of small dreams and triangulation.
They worry that, like Bill, President Hillary will kick the Social Security crisis down the road because solving it would be politically risky. When Hillary talks about how she learned her lessons during the health care reform debacle of 1993, they wonder what those lessons are. Don't buck the insurance industry? Settle for incremental changes, but don't risk political capital on major reforms?
The Democrats' chances in 2008 are looking good, but the rank and file want more than a victory. They want a president with the courage to do more than pursue a perpetual campaign. For the doubters, electability and inevitability aren't enough.
Rick Holmes is opinion editor for the MetroWest (Mass.) Daily News. He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.