Included on today's Chicago Tribune's front page is the article "Hillary." In it, national correspondent Lisa Anderson speculates on the possibility of Senator Clinton transferring her apparent popularity in New York State to the 2008 presidential election.
One of the people interviewed is the director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion. He points out: "19 percent (of those polled) think, right now, that she's doing a poor job. The Hillary-haters are still there. The people who were willing to give her a chance, she won over."
Also quoted is a Baruch College professor who states: "There's going to be an irreducible number of Hillary-haters, no matter what she does. Whether she changes water into wine or parts the Red Sea, they ain't voting for her."
The piece then continues with, "No one may know how many Hillary-haters are out there. . . "
This may come as an unpleasant surprise to the mainstream media and academics, but there are voters who oppose Mrs. Clinton not because they personally "hate" her, but because of how she's represented them in the Senate. These may include people who don't care for her 100 percent rating from pro-abortion groups or her single-digit ratings from taxpayer organizations. Or folks not enthused about her high ranking in the evaluations of groups like the ACLU, the National Education Association, the AFL-CIO and the Children's Defense fund. Perhaps they're disappointed that the National Journal found that in 2005 Mrs. Clinton voted more liberal on economic, defense and foreign policy issues than 80 percent of the Senate. Or more liberal on social policy issues than 83 percent of the Senate.
It simplistically wrong to designate everyone who disagrees with Mrs. Clinton as a "Hillary-hater." There are plenty of reasons other than personal animosity to oppose her election to anything.
