Some rank-and-file Democrats fear Clinton bid

Debunking 'she can't win'
Another Clinton defender is Garth Corriveau, a Manchester, N.H. lawyer and Democratic activist.

“I frankly think she should run,” Corriveau said. “I don’t believe the whole ‘she can’t win’ thing, because if you ask me, the Clintons are the best political strategists of the last half of the twentieth century. Everyone knows the national election is going to come down to five or ten states again: who’s to say that the people in Ohio or New Hampshire or Florida or New Mexico aren’t going to vote for her? I think that’s ridiculous.”

To do justice to Sen. Clinton’s popularity, we should note that she has raised $27.5 million for her 2006 re-election fund.

According to the Federal Election Commission, more than 18,000 individual donors across the nation have chipped in to Clinton’s Senate fund — and they did so knowing that she need not use most of her cash (since she faces negligible Republican opposition in her race this year) and she can roll over that money into her presidential campaign war chest if she decides to run.

But the skeptics in Iowa and New Hampshire are too numerous to discount.

“I think it’s a big mistake,” said Arnie Arnesen, New Hampshire radio talk show host and former congressional candidate, of a potential Clinton run for the White House.

“I think we need to make a decision as a nation that we are not going to recycle bumper stickers for about ten or 15 years,” she said. “That was the Bush problem and that’s the Clinton problem. It’s not that Clinton isn’t a bright, articulate woman… In this state she will have to prove that she is by far the best and that the liability of that recycled bumper sticker is far outweighed by the capability.”

Will Clinton go to New Hampshire to do retail campaigning? “I think she’s terrified,” said Arnesen.

'A bit of a chameleon'
Jackie Cilley, a state representative in New Hampshire and a Dean supporter in ’04, said, “I would prefer to see somebody like Sen. Feingold or Gov. Warner .... I think she’s a remarkable woman; I think she’s done remarkable things.” But Cilley added Clinton is “willing to be a bit of a chameleon in order to appease a larger group of the voters.”

“I worry about the fragmentation issue,” said another New Hampshire Democrat, state senator Peter Burling. “The country seems so incredibly polarized right now. I have a yearning for a Democratic candidate whose primary effect will be to bring us together.”

Recalling his work for Rep. Dick Gephardt’s presidential bid in 2004, he said, “Gephardt was the kind of guy who could pull folks together. Boy, do we have to do that. It’s not a Democratic imperative, it’s a national imperative. I do worry about how a Clinton campaign at this point would affect that.”

While some rank-and-file Democrats argue Clinton can't win the presidency, others suggest that she might not make the best Democratic nominee because she hasn't shown leadership qualities, especially on the issue of the Iraq war.

Dr. Bill Siroty, a 2004 Howard Dean supporter from Amherst, N.H., said that for those Democrats who are deeply opposed to the Iraq war, Clinton is “part of the problem” since “she supports the status quo” and has been unwilling to call for a date for withdrawal of American troops. If Clinton were willing to join Feingold’s call for a specific end date, “people would be dancing in the streets.”

Why aren’t national polls picking up such Clinton skepticism from Democratic activists? The answer: because respondents to those surveys are not necessarily Democrats who cast ballots, nor even registered Democratic voters.

Surveys such as the Gallup Poll don’t specifically sample Democrats who in fact voted in the 2004 primaries. It is not that such voters can’t be sampled — a pollster could select names randomly from a state’s voter file — the official record of those who actually cast ballots in the most recent Democratic primary election.

But at this early date no pollster has gone to the expense of using voter files to determine party activists’ sentiment about the 2008 race.