Is Hillary Clinton Any Good at Running for President?

AdamSmith · April 6, 2015

As a rabid Hillary fan, I find this worryingly on the mark.

Is Hillary Clinton Any Good at Running for President?

New York Magazine

...Pat Buchanan, the venerable Republican operative who advised Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, likes to assess politicians as political athletes. Putting aside ideologies, policy preferences, even personalities, how do they perform on the political playing field? "It's charisma, charm, savvy," he says. "Being a political athlete is having an extra dimension -- it's not learned; you're born with it." In Buchanan's long career, the greatest political athletes he's encountered have been John F. Kennedy, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. "They're naturals: Roy Hobbs or Mickey Mantle," he says. Hillary, in Buchanan's view, is the furthest thing from a natural: "She's like Pete Rose, who has to grind out every hit."

The grind can be obvious watching Clinton on the campaign trail. In her two successful Senate races and her unsuccessful presidential run in 2008, she often struggled to exhibit the basic qualities required of politicians. "Let's remember who she's beaten in her career: Rick Lazio and John Spencer," says a Democratic consultant who has worked for and against Hillary. "The only time she's run against anyone decent, she's lost." Where most pols project warmth, she often runs cold. Her speeches can be leaden and forced. She tightens up in unscripted moments.

Above all, she bristles at what the public and the press now want most from politicians: authenticity. As she said in a press-conference soliloquy during her 2000 Senate campaign, "'Who are you?' and all of that. I don't know if that is the right question. Even people you think you know extremely well, do you know their entire personality? Do they, at every point you're with them, reveal totally who they are? Of course not. We now expect people in the public arena to somehow do that. I don't understand the need behind that."...

"She's a schemer and a planner and a plodder," says the GOP consultant Rick Wilson, who worked for Rudy Giuliani during his aborted 2000 Senate campaign against Clinton. "You need people like that in politics, but most of the time they end up as campaign strategists, not candidates." Buchanan is more blunt: "She reminds me of Nixon."

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