Hillary Clinton’s Poisoned Prize
Trump isn’t going anywhere, nor are his provocations. It was the birther conspiracy yesterday; it will be something else tomorrow. And Clinton isn’t trading war for peace. Her presidency, should it indeed happen, will be a battle royal. The circumstances surrounding it are as politically daunting and inhospitable to accomplishment as those facing any of her predecessors over the last half-century.
.. And nearly all of the seats that Republicans are projected to lose, he said, are those of relatively moderate lawmakers. It’s not the hyper-conservative members of the Freedom Caucus who are on the run. They’re from safely Republican districts. They’re fine. They’ll be back — and, proportionally, they’ll be a bigger, more forceful presence among the Republicans remaining in the House.
.. “What’s often missed about the Freedom Caucus is that the majority is less of a priority for them than having a pure ideology.”
.. Already, some House conservatives have called for hearings about Clinton’s emails after any Clinton inauguration; one of them has already raised the specter of impeachment. At this stage, it’s in the very DNA of the relationship between Clintons and Republicans for there to be dire threats, special investigations, public grilling. It’s a reflex, a tic. Not even a landslide on Nov. 8 would change that.
.. Many of the votes she gets on Nov. 8 will come from people more committed to suppressing Trump than to elevating her
.. the percentage of voters who viewed her unfavorably (54 percent) was still 12 points higher than the percentage who viewed her favorably (42 percent).
That spread was 15 points in a CNN poll over the same period. No president in modern history has taken office after such sustained unpopularity in the run-up to the election.
.. And no president in my lifetime has confronted what Clinton surely will: an opponent who is vanquished but not remotely humbled.