Some rank-and-file Democrats fear Clinton bid

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Public opinion polls, as well as inside-the-Beltway punditry, suggest that Sen. Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

A Gallup Poll in February found that 39 percent of self-described Democrats and Democratic “leaners” would be most likely to support Clinton for the 2008 nomination. The next closest Democrat was 2004 nominee Sen. John Kerry with 15 percent.

But recent interviews with dozens of active Democrats in Iowa and New Hampshire, the states that hold the first caucus and primary of 2008, reveal that many party members who vote in those early contests don’t want Clinton as their nominee.

These politically active Democrats voice a sense of resignation, verging on fatalism, about a Clinton run for the nomination.

“I hope she won’t run, and I don’t know whether I’d support her,” said Jean Lloyd-Jones, a veteran Democrat from Iowa City, Iowa who was the party’s unsuccessful Senate nominee in 1992.

During the 1992 campaign Lloyd-Jones spent a day and half with Bill and Hillary Clinton and Al and Tipper Gore in Iowa on their now-famous bus tour.

Hope she stays in the Senate
“I think she should stay in the Senate a bit longer,” said Lloyd-Jones, who chipped in $1,000 to Clinton’s 2006 Senate re-election fund. “I don’t think this is the time for her to run (for president). I don’t quite understand why she is such a polarizing figure, but she is.”

Lloyd-Jones voiced admiration for Clinton: “she’s very smart, savvy and on the right side of most issues.” Nevertheless she said, “Those of us who think she’d be a great president are fearful of the viciousness of the attacks we anticipate the opposition would level at her.”

NBC VIDEO For Democrats, a Clinton conundrum June 6: Many Democrats have mixed feelings about the possibility that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton will run for president. MSNBC.com’s Tom Curry reports from New Hampshire. MSNBC

“I think she’s just a lightning rod for both sides,” said Jan Sutherland, a Council Bluffs, Iowa retiree and part-time teacher of English as a second language, who supported Kerry in the 2004 caucuses. “There are too many people who dislike Hillary. It’s not that Hillary can’t handle the job, they just simply dislike Hillary and they’d vote against her personally.”

Sutherland added: “I don’t think she can win. It will just keep the country split.”

“She has great name identity,” noted Democratic state senator Daryl Beall, from Fort Dodge in northwest Iowa. He backed Howard Dean in the 2004 caucuses.

But Beall said, “I would have a difficult time supporting her, frankly…. She comes with a lot of political baggage. As I talk to people, I just don’t hear her even being considered among the top candidates.”

He also said, “I understand she’s kind of making a migration to the center. Bill Clinton did that fairly easily, but I think she’s upset a lot of her more left-of-center Democratic base in the process. The flag burning issue and things of that nature, more symbolic probably than substantive, but it has not resonated well.”

A code word?
The word “polarizing” — without any explicit mention of Clinton’s name — may have become a kind of coded reference to her.

Last weekend, when I asked 2008 Democratic contender and former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner whether he was a compelling alternative to Clinton, he laughed off the question as typical news media fluff.

But then he added, “I think this country is in need of the kind of transformative change that’s going to take leaders that are not polarizing, leaders that can see a little bit farther down the road.”

Interactive Analyzing the 2008 presidential field

Vigorously defending Clinton from the “polarizing” argument is Bill Shaheen, who headed John Kerry’s primary campaign in New Hampshire three years ago, as well as chairing the Al Gore New Hampshire effort in 2000.

The “polarizing” allegation “is a myth perpetuated by the news media,” Shaheen said. “Two things that Hillary Clinton has done that you could take an opinion on and be critical of: one is she wanted universal health care for all Americans,” he said. “Well, shame on her. If that’s a polarization, well then let’s get polarized. The second thing is she forgave her husband; she stood by her man. What’s the sin in that? What’s the other thing she’d done that has hurt people? The answer is nothing. Tell me what else she’s done to polarize America.”

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