Best thing Hillary ever did for the Clinton name was lose back in ‘08

It’s laughable, when you think about it.

CLINTON: Would we like her as much if she had won?

There’s a new poll out (commissioned by the Washington Post and ABC News) that says 57 percent of all people surveyed would like to see soon-to-be former Secretary of State Hillary R. Clinton run for president come the 2016 election cycle.

IT’S NOT JUST that some people already are getting excited about ’16 even though Barack Obama has yet to take the oath of office to serve the four-year term to which he won re-election last month.

It’s more that I have vivid memory of when Hillary Clinton was THE most reviled human being in the U.S. political scene – even more so than husband (and president) Bill.

Heck, there were some people whose biggest objection to Bill Clinton was that he didn’t put a muzzle on his wife!

Now, as Hillary Clinton plans to step down after having served four years under President Obama as Secretary of State, it seems that we can’t get enough of her.

THIS IS LARGELY a woman-driven thing. It would seem we are long overdue to start taking women seriously as potential chief executives of the U.S. government. And she is getting the credit for many of the accomplishments that occurred during the first term of the Obama presidency.

Which is not a problem. She had a hand in many of them. She deserves her praise.

But looking at the details of this poll, it would seem the only people who still have their hang-ups about Hillary are white men who identify with the Republican Party.

Only 13 percent of them like the idea of Hillary Clinton running for president. But Republican (35 percent) and politically independent (68 percent) women are willing to go along with the 84 percent of women who are Democrats in saying they’d like to have Hillary as president.

IT MAY WELL be that Obama’s best action of his first term was not to take personally all the pot-shots that the Clinton presidential campaign directed his day during the 2008 primary. He picked her for possibly the most important position (I know some will argue attorney general) of his cabinet.

But what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had won that Democratic primary?

What if she had gone on to clean John McCain’s clock in the general election? What if we literally had spent the past four years with William Jefferson Clinton as the nation’s first “first gentleman?”

You know very well that Hillary Clinton’s approval rating (66 percent, according to the poll) wouldn’t be anywhere near that high.

SHE’D BE THE one lagging far down in the teens (or maybe low 20s) when it comes to supporters. She’d be the one getting blamed for everything that could possibly go wrong.

And you just know that Bill Clinton would have done something that would have further infuriated all those people who devoted the bulk of their lives in 1998 to trying to remove him from office through the impeachment process.

The best thing that could have ever happened to the Clintons on a personal level was not having to endure the hassle of actually trying to run the country.

Because the bottom line is that we all have a certain level to which we will give a knee-jerk reaction of blame in dealing with any incumbent officials. It’s all their fault! Dump the fool so that we can move on to blame their replacement.

SO EXCUSE ME if I don’t exactly take seriously the idea of a poll being taken now that says the one-time Goldwater Girl from suburban Park Ridge ought to be a presidential contender in four years.

All those people who are thinking we should have voted for Clinton in 2008? If that had happened, they’d now be wondering how much better off things would be if they had voted for that Obama guy four years ago!

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