The claim that Hillary will challenge Obama in 2012 is a lot like the claim that George W. Bush would dump Dick Cheney in 2004. In both cases, what seemed like dispassionate analysis was actually wishful thinking. Liberals loved speculating about Bush dumping Cheney because it would have confirmed what they desperately wanted to believe: that the Bush-Cheney ticket was too right-wing to win re-election. Similarly, conservatives are hungry to believe that Hillary Clinton will blow up the Democratic Party in order to give herself another chance at the Oval Office. But that’s hard to square with her loyalty to Obama during his race against John McCain, and her loyalty as secretary of state. As much as conservatives yearn to see Hillary as someone loyal to nothing but her own ambition, the last couple of years don’t bear out the case.
Similarly, conservatives yearn to see Obama as a failed president, and nothing would make them happier than to see that analysis validated by those on Obama’s side of the aisle. In her Wall Street Journal column, Noonan declared that “Mr. Obama is starting to look unlucky, and–file this under Mysteries of Leadership–that is dangerous for him because Americans get nervous when they have a snakebit president.” Noonan’s only evidence for this sweeping judgment about American political history is Jimmy Carter, to whom she compares Obama eight times. (A more problematic data point might have been Franklin Roosevelt, who was unlucky enough to encounter both the Great Depression and Adolf Hitler, and yet won the presidency four times).
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