Can anyone name the most recent American president who ran to succeed a two-term president of his or her party who had an approval number of well under 50 percent, and won? Nobody can, because nobody did.
Several people did spin out a one-party run for more than three cycles, but the circumstances were special, and the occasions were rare. In 1908 and 1988 William Howard Taft and the elder George Bush succeeded Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, but the latter two presidents were already legends.
In 1940 (and 1944) Franklin D. Roosevelt succeeded himself because in May, 1940, Hitler’s forces had annexed western Europe, and in 1948 Harry S. Truman succeeded himself because in the two years before he had put in place the structures and policies that forty years later would bring down the Communist empire.
Even a pretty good record can’t manage to do it: though the electoral margins were painfully slim, the peace-and-prosperity presidencies of Dwight Eisenhower and William J. Clinton couldn’t bring their vice-presidents home. What are the chances that Hillary Clinton, a pedestrian figure close to her 70’s, can succeed President Obama, whose favorable ratings right now are down around 40, and unlikely to rise? When he won in 2008, people said he’d make history, but who knew it would be as one of the very few presidents to have two huge defeats in both of his midterms? It takes truly rare brains to do that.
What doesn’t take brains is trying to think of the reasons why last week’s election hasn’t been good to our girl. It increases the odds that by 2016 Obama will be an insurmountable drag on the Democrats. It forces her to put serious distance between herself and the president whose team she once joined. It subverts the idea that the ‘Clinton brand’ can emerge on its own as different and separate option: Bill and Hillary rushed to support some Obama-deniers, and all except Jeanne Shaheen lost. Alison Lundergan Grimes clung to them both, and lost in a landslide.
Bill tried to reclaim his home turf in Arkansas, and his state turned a deep shade of crimson. Hillary went to the wall for Mark Udall on “women’s health” issues, and Udall was laughed off the stage by his former supporters. The “war on women” and the Clinton effect seem to have hit their sell-by date at just the same moment.
As Mark Halperin notes, the results have thrown her off balance; forcing her to keep just enough distance between herself and Obama and the Republican Congress to run as a genuine Third Way alternative, while at the same time being a partisan Democrat. Halperin suggests that this task may well be beyond her. “The loser from last night [is] Hillary Clinton,” as he has noted. “This operation does not deal with complexity well.”
Poor Hillary. In 2008, Obama disrupted her 30-year plan to succeed Bill in office, but it seemed her ambitions were merely delayed. Obama would have eight great years in office and hand down to her a new and revitalized party, her duties at State would boost her credentials, and the first woman would follow the first black president into high office in a tour de force double play.
That was then. This is now, and the phenomenon has turned into the ultimate loser, whose worst judgments have come in her own field of influence, which would be, of course, foreign affairs. Has fate ever played a worse trick on an ardent conniver? Not very often. Was Obama put on this earth to thwart Hillary Clinton? The jury is out about that.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this column said that Obama was the first Democrat to face huge losses in both midterm elections of a presidency. Though only a few presidents have suffered such losses, he would not be the first.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
