As you would expect as soon as the speechdategate happened, the "If it was Hillary" crowd came out in full force as always when it a "good news for McCain". For example yesterday this diarist wrote a nice diary on how she/he should have voted for Clinton instead of Obama because she would be more progressive. I respect her/his opinion while disagreeing with it. And today on Morning Joe it was "Hillary had more balls than Obama" day.
While I disagree with the core of her diary, I didn't h-rated the diary for sharing her/his opinion. I mainly disagree with her/his assessment that Hillary Clinton was to the left of Obama. She wasn’t. She is to his right on almost everything. And she is hawkish and has the obsession of appearing tough on foreign policy in order to gain Neocons support. Her advisers, including James Carville, told her to vote for the war on Iraq because she could gain Neocons support if she wanted to run in 2008. So if Hillary Clinton had been president with advisors like James Carville, Larry Davis, Terry McAulife (Sp??) or Mark Penn, she would have been far more to the right that Obama is right now. If Hillary had won the presidency (which I highly doubt) she would have engaged a war in Iran only to appear tougher and to again Neocons support.
But that’s another debate, today yet again, on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the buffoons appearing on this show as always were blaming Obama for everything from Mika having a bad haircut to Joe having small eyes. Ok but still. So the topic of their discussion was how wonderful the world would have been if Hillary had won. And Joe Scarborough (yes the guy who told us that Guiliani would beat Hillary to win the presidency in 2008) called Obama “politically irrelevant” and called the 2012 election to the GOP. I mean, why bother vote? Joe Scarborough has spoken, Obama lost, Perry or Romney or maybe…. His new love Chris Christie had already won the presidency.
Back to the main topic, so according Scarborough and his dittoheads, Hillary would have been a greater president than Obama and bla bla bla bla. Just like I’m sure McCain would have been a greater president than Bush 43, right Joe? Of course Joe Scarborough would never say that because his head so deep inside Jeb’s ass for him to say such a thing.
Yet there is one thing the “If it was Hillary” crowd forgets; Hillary would have lost against McCain. Here why. Obama partly won because Bush was president, but mainly won because McCain picked the stupidest Vice-president nominee in Sarah Palin because he wanted to win female voters. Various polls before John McCain picked Palin showed that Obama wasn’t certain to beat McCain or to win the presidency. In fact, John McCain numbers were still pretty good despite having George W Bush in the White House. He managed to stay within the margin of error tied with Obama in many polls. The McCain Campaign made sure to not let the White House crowd be tied to them. And it paid off with John McCain being close to Obama in polls. If I’m not wrong, in August 2008, it was a time when, McCain was ahead of Obama. Yeah it was Zogby or USA/Gallup that had McCain leading Obama by 5 points in August.
Then McCain nightmare started with the picking of Sarah Palin. He picked her because as Stephanie Miller put it in 2008 “McCain thought women are dumb enough to vote for Palin because she has a vagina”. McCain picked Palin because Hillary Clinton wasn't the nominee. he underestimated women's judgement, Obama's performance with women and mostly of all he overestimated the impact of PUMAs.
In Game Change, the author revealed that McCain camp thought til the last minute that Obama would pick Hillary Clinton as VP. So when he picked Biden, their campaign rejoiced and decided to change their plan of picking Tim Pawlenty in order to bank on the Hillary voters. Bill Kristol came to them and brought up Palin's name suggesting to the campaign that she would attracted disenchanted Hillary voters. So they went in Alaska and picked Palin.
So if Hillary Clinton had been the nominee, John McCain wouldn’t have committed the political suicide of picking Palin. He would have probably stayed with his original plan of Tim Pawlenty or would have picked Romney or Jindal. Hillary would have probably faced a much tougher ticket to beat than Obama with McCain/Palin.
Obama won because Bush was president and also because Palin was the VP nominee.
7:24 AM PT: For clarification, I don't say that Hillary would have lost because she was a bad candidate. I'm just saying because McCain and GOPers thought she was the toughest to beat, they would have picked a much stronger VP because they were more frightened by her than by Obama. They underestimated Obama til the end, the choice of Palin was the proof of that.