Barring a miraculous upsurge in President Obama’s dismal 41% approval rating, Hillary Clinton’s run for president in 2016 will be a steep uphill climb. Clinton will need to walk a political tight rope, distancing herself from Obama without coming across as a disloyal member of the president’s political coterie.
“Secretary Clinton is distancing herself a bit on foreign policy matters from the administration recently,” said John Hudak, a Brookings Institution fellow and expert on presidential campaigns. “This is a pretty standard practice for anyone looking to succeed the sitting president, even within the same party.”
Nevertheless, Hillary enjoys the fruits of being the first lady for the popular 42nd president of the United States and maintains her eternal romance with the liberal media, which conveniently ignores her failures as Secretary of State (think chaos in Benghazi, Syria, Russia, Iran, Israel-Palestine). Yet some observers believe it might not be enough to overcome Obama’s negative momentum.
According to Damon Linker in his article for The Week, Hillary is not going to be mired by her track record but rather by trying to evade being connected to the president: “The problem has nothing to do with Hillary’s image or record. (‘Benghazi’ will be decisive only to people who would never consider voting for her in the first place.) A presidential campaign can adjust an image and respond proactively to glitches in a candidate’s record. But it can’t do anything about running in the shadow of an unpopular, ineffective president. And that, increasingly, is what it looks like Hillary is going to have to do.”
Linker affirms that the Affordable Care Act is so unpopular that the administration is willing to risk taking potentially unconstitutional measures to delay its implementation in hopes that eventually it will be well received and self sustaining. So far none of the delays and revisions that Obama and friends have implemented have successfully deflected the blows landed on the American public by the disastrous ACA. According to Linker, Mrs. Clinton will be on the defensive throughout her 2016 presidential run.
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