Noah Millman asks, “how would a serious challenge to Clinton, even if it failed, affect the Republican contest?”
It seems to me that a Clinton coronation makes life much easier for those who don’t want to think too hard about what the GOP stands for. The GOP would really like to run a largely negative campaign against the Clinton-Obama record without having to declare itself too clearly on any issue. A Clinton coronation would make that easier, because it would take away the need for Clinton to define herself in any specific way.
Take foreign policy.
Clinton is at the extreme hawkish end of the Democratic Party. She pushed hard for the intervention in Libya, favored a more forceful and earlier intervention in Syria, a tougher line on Iran, and so forth. If she faced a serious primary challenge from, say, Jim Webb, she’d either have to defend that record forcefully, or moderate her stance. Now, if she did the first, then what happens on the Republican side at the same time? First, Rand Paul says he agrees more with Jim Webb. Second, the other GOP contenders have to decide whether they want to echo Clinton, echo Paul, or come up with an alternative way of explaining their views while remaining hawkish. Whatever they do, they have to provide more clarity.
Larison expects a “debate over Libya on the Democratic side could have some very interesting and desirable effects on the intra-Republican debate and on Clinton’s ability to use her time as Secretary of State to her advantage”:
Clinton “owns” the Libyan war in a way that she isn’t similarly responsible for other policy decisions, and that war was a terrible mistake that she urged the president to make.
Webb could attack her consistent support for recklessly hawkish policies without having to recall a debate from a decade earlier, and Paul could use the intervention to highlight an episode where he demonstrated better judgment than the then-Secretary of State. The more that Clinton is forced to defend her record on the Libyan war itself, rather than endlessly relitigating the 2012 attack in Benghazi, the worse it will be for her. The record shows that she was one of the architects of a major policy blunder that is still having destructive effects on the country that “benefited” from the intervention.
advises Democrats to “derail Hillary Clinton.” He calls her “a mortal threat to the next generation of social democratic reform”:
Obama beat Hillary by pointing out that he had been right on the most consequential foreign policy issue since the Vietnam War, and she had been wrong. Amazingly, he appointed her secretary of State, where she pushed hard for military engagement in Libya, which quickly turned into a stateless region dominated by terrorist gangs — a dumpster fire along the Mediterranean.
Hillary Clinton was molded by the Cold War liberal’s fear of looking soft on foreign policy, and she has become the John McCain of the Democratic Party. Already smarting from Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo Bay, his eager embrace of drone warfare, and his expansion of the surveillance state, do liberals really want to lock all that in under Madame Smart Power?
The Dish 