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April 02, 2007

God Save Us From Hillary Clinton

Matt Drudge this morning proudly displayed as his top headline, "America loves Hillary; Top Fundraiser for Round One: $36 Million." Hillary is reporting that she has raised $26 million since January 20 and has transferred $10 million from her senate reelection account, for a total of $36 million. 80% of the 50,000 contributions she received were for amounts of $100 or less, and $4.2 million was raised in the Internet for a total of $6 million in "grassroots" donations. To put this into perspective, she has raised more than three times the amount that the top candidates raised by now during the last Presidential campaign. How the hell did that happen?

For one thing, it seems the big money people like Hillary a LOT. The little people seem to prefer Barack Obama. According to his Web site, while Hillary has received contributions from 50,000 people, Obama has received donations from 83,531 people. Sadly, though the little contributions are an interesting indicator of popular support, they won't buy you a campaign. I would like to think that grassroots enthusiasm would be sufficient to push an underdog all the way through, so that the people would actually get a real opportunity to choose their own candidate. But money really does seem to be able to change people's minds. So somehow, Obama will need to get the big guys to jump in and support him, too.

On the other hand, Hillary is fighting an uphill battle to win votes. Women don't like her. Both Rasmussen and Zogby find that approximately 42% of women dislike her so intensely that they would NEVER vote for her under any circumstances. And 18% of Democrats "would never cast a vote in Clinton's favor." A Harris Poll released last week showed half of adults would not vote for her at all, ever, and only 36% indicated they would. The rest, 11%, clearly did not like her, but might vote for her. Harris's numbers showed 21% of Democrats refusing to vote for her ever, along with 48% of Independents. 45% dislike her personally and 45% dislike her political opinions. And only 37% would be happy to see both Bill and Hillary back in the White House.

Something interesting to keep an eye on here is what Hillary does with all that money and how well she is able to convert it into increased popularity. We won't know for another two weeks how much she actually has left or how much is earmarked for use solely in the general election. My guess is she is going to have to burn through a tremendous amount of money throughout the entire campaign to create an aura of invincibility around herself. Otherwise, I foresee Democrats staying home in large numbers on Election Day, 2008. If you ask me, that's the entire reason why Rupert Murdoch is supporting her. It may well be why Matt Drudge is also continuously puffing her up as the inevitable choice. The real question is whether Democrats will allow these manipulative right-wingers to get away with tanking their Party's chances at the polls next year.

Posted by Becky at April 2, 2007 09:19 AM