Hillary Clinton has a new problem as she tries to tiptoe away from her former boss’ liberal policies and lay claim to her husband’s crown as ruler of the centrist Democrats.
According to a new survey of how voters view her politics, the former architect of Bill Clinton’s failed plan to nationalize healthcare, the one-time New York senator and President Obama’s first secretary of state is viewed as a true-blue lefty.
Pollster David Winston provided the Washington Examiner with his latest analysis that included his trademark political sliding scale that for the first time tested the public’s opinion of Clinton’s political pulse.
He found that on a scale of 1 for liberal to 9 for conservative, voters put Clinton at 3.6, to the left of the House Democratic Caucus and just shy of Obama’s 3.37, the most liberal on the chart.
Voters put themselves at a right-of-center 5.79, a yawning 2 points away from Clinton. Even independents registered to the right of the middle, at 5.56.
“Looking at 2016, the ideological spectrum should [be] concerning for Democrats, especially the likely front-runner Hillary Clinton. The good news for her is voters put her to the right of President Obama. The bad news for her is voters put her significantly to the left of where they put themselves ideologically,” Winston said.
And, he added, it could be especially bad if the election is a fight over liberal versus conservative policies, not personalities, where her “charisma” could parry GOP slaps.
GOP ‘DARK HORSE’ MIKE PENCE EMERGING
He’s been called the 2016 GOP “dark horse” presidential candidate, but Indiana Gov. Mike Pence is receiving too much buzz to keep that title much longer.
Key Republican leaders and pollsters quizzed by the Examiner are cooing over Pence’s chance to be the GOP standard bearer. They cheer about his efforts to turn Indiana into a Midwest economic engine, his Reaganesque positive outlook and his leadership as the House Republican Conference chairman in 2010, the year the party took back control of the chamber.
And some say that he will be able to raise millions of dollars because of his deep ties to both social and business conservatives and also because one of his former top aides runs a free-market group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers.
CATHOLIC CONCERN ON SINKING FERTILITY RATE
The Catholic Church is warning that President Obama’s bid to promote birth control and reduce pregnancies will push the U.S. fertility rate to a record low, leaving younger Americans with the heavy burden of caring for a growing elderly population — and fewer Catholics.
The U.S. fertility rate now stands at 1.87 births per woman, down from 3.7 in 1960, and the Obama administration is mounting a campaign to reduce “unintended pregnancies” by 10 percent before 2020.
“If successful, these put so many other government programs in danger of becoming unsustainable by constantly downsizing the next generation of workers and taxpayers who will support the ever growing top of the population pyramid,” said the latest research report from CARA, a research center affiliated with Georgetown University.
By extension, fewer pregnancies could reduce the number of Catholics in the nation, a worldwide trend as fertility rates drop across the globe.
“As the Catholic Church focuses this year on the family it must grapple with the fact that family is just simply becoming less common all together. Where it does exist, it most often now includes fewer people,” the report said.
KISSINGER AT URINAL: NIXON WAS ‘THE RIGHT MAN’
He’s a Washington institution and a prolific writer and commentator on the presidency, but that doesn’t mean that the Brookings Institution’s Stephen Hess’ rich mental library of great stories is close to being tapped out.
His latest offering is one of his best, a 172-page hardback about his days early in the Nixon administration helping Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The Professor and the President debuts this week and is chock full of stories about the duo and how the Republican relied on the Democrat’s advice on everything from domestic policy to the best biographies.
But it’s his story about Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s foreign policy czar, that jumped out. Hess recalls debating Kissinger during the 1968 presidential campaign. Hess backed Nixon, Kissinger backed Nelson Rockefeller.
A year later, as they both stood inside the White House basement at side-by-side urinals, Kissinger confessed to Hess, “Steve, you were right. This is the right man for this moment in history.”
Nixon’s reward from Henry K? He dedicates his book, White House Years, to “the memory of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller,” Nixon’s archenemy, and doesn’t dedicate any of his next 11 books to the man who made him secretary of state and gave him a place in history.
Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected].
