Posts For: April 2, 2007
Hypothetical Presidents
Time’s Jay Carney finds it very peculiar that potential Republican candidates are polling better than Democrats in hypothetical presidential match-ups. After all, he says, President Bush’s approval numbers are low, the war is unpopular, and the Democrats just won the mid-term elections.
Carney offers a few possible explanations, noting the maverick character of the Republican front-runners and the polarizing force of Hillary Clinton. (John Hood, at the Corner, also believes Hillary is the key.)
But more is at play here, I suspect, than the burdens of Hillary’s history. Though the Democrats have some significant tactical advantages, the Republican field is much more presidential in some key respects. The three leading Democrats at the moment are Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. All of them are Senators (or in the case of Edwards a former Senator who has been running for President since he left), and the Senate has not produced too many Presidents lately. The last sitting Senator to go to the White House was John Kennedy, 47 years ago. None of the Democrats has a bit of executive experience, and all are also fairly generic down-the-left liberals, even if Obama would prefer to pretend he is not.
