Ben Smith, spiritual godfather of the New York blogging scene, has a column in today's Daily News that's in need of a bit of commentary. Titled 'Why Hil can win in 2008 – top Dem pollster explores her path to victory', the article rests on interviews with, respectively, Hillary's pollster Mark Penn and an aide to John McCain, one John Weaver.

So of course, Penn says – as he's paid to do – that the numbers are moving in Hillary's direction, while Weaver – as he's paid to do – scoffs at the idea and gets in a dig about Hillary's implied honesty problem as well. I suppose that if you were to ask Bill Gates whether Microsoft produces a superior product, he'd answer in the affirmative as well. It might have been helpful, for the purposes of this article, to have, say, an independent voice with no stake in the subject to discuss it. That's assuming, by the way, that people care more about poll numbers than what the candidates actually propose to do, a subject which gets short shrift by the existing media culture.

The problems for Penn's case are manifold. While there's a small movement in Hillary's direction, as there historically is for every freshly re-elected figure, that movement is less than that for generic Democrats or for the Democratic Party. Penn cites the new ABC/WaPo poll that gives his candidate a 56% approve, 40% disapprove split; the corresponding number for the Democratic Party in the new USA Today/Gallup poll is 57% positive, 33% negative. In short, Hillary underperforms her party by 8 points. A good overview of polls, from which all these numbers are taken, is Pollingreport.com.

What's more interesting than the binary approve/disapprove split is the breakdown of strong and weak support/opposition and how it has developed over time. The newest NBC/WSJ poll gives her a 21% 'very positive' and 22% 'somewhat positive' rating, 17% 'neutral', 12% 'somewhat negative' and a whopping 26% 'very negative'. In short, by a more than 2:1 split, opponents are fervently in that camp; while weak and strong supporters are more evenly split 1:1. These numbers have been roughly stable in the poll's timeline since 1999. The numbers from April/May 2000 in the same poll, screened for registered voters, read: 20 % 'very positive', 19% 'somewhat positive', 15% 'neutral', 14% 'somewhat negative', 31% 'very negative', with a margin of error of 4.4%.

What's also missing in Penn's argument is the nearly uniform polling picture, stable over time and across polls, that shows Hillary being beaten soundly by John McCain. The most recent LAT/Bloomberg poll has the contest at 50% McCain, 36% Clinton, other/undecided 14%. Penn characterizes this poll as an outlier; it's not. In the same poll, a posited Romney/Clinton match-up has her at 42% against a virtual unknown. The most recent NPR poll – the source for all polls cited is here, all taken during November and December of 2006 - has McCain 48%, Clinton 41%. Fox News has it McCain 48%, Clinton 40%, even Giuliani 48%, Clinton 39%. Marist polls Giuliani and McCain both at 49%, Clinton at 43%. Cook Political: McCain 44%, Clinton 42%. Hotline: McCain 45%, Clinton 40%. McLaughlin: McCain or Giuliani 51%, Hillary 35% and 37% respectively. Newsweek has the actual outlier, McCain 43%, Clinton 50%.

Is there a trend here?

All of these polls should be taken with large grains of salt, as a brief glance at the calendar suggests. But if past is precedent, Hillary Clinton will never be elected President in a general election; the stable polling picture, over time and across polls, suggests no other outcome. An example of such a timeline is Marist's, which reads:

11/12-06: Giuliani 49%, Clinton 43%
9-06: Giuliani 49%, Clinton 42%
2-06: Giuliani 48%, Clinton 47%
10-05: Giuliani 50%, Clinton 43%
4-05: Giuliani 47%, Clinton 46%
2-05: Giuliani 49%, Clinton 47%

11/12-06: McCain 49%, Clinton 43%
9-06: McCain 48%, Clinton 43%
2-06: McCain 52%, Clinton 42%
10-05: McCain 50%, Clinton 41%
4-05: McCain 50%, Clinton 42%
2-05: McCain 54%, Clinton 42%

The real news in Ben's article is actually, for those of us who like to parse these things, this nugget:

Hinting at the shape of a Clinton-McCain race, Penn suggested McCain's problem isn't his personality, but his positions.

"People don't know a lot of his views exactly - where he's been on abortion, where he's been on the war," he said.

What I'd take from that is that team Clinton is getting ready to run a relentlessly negative campaign. In short, if you liked the partisanship of the nineties and of this decade, rejoice: you're about to get a whole lot more. The most likely way for a nominee Hillary to win the general election, based on what we know today, is to make the other guy unacceptable; which is, of course, the core operating principle of one Karl Rove.

Gonna be way ugly, that.

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