Looking back, some voters think they picked the wrong Democrat.
Jamelle BouieAccording to a new Bloomberg poll, most Americans are big fans of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a plurality believe that she would have been a better president than Barack Obama had she been elected:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans hold a favorable view of her and one-third are suffering a form of buyer’s remorse, saying the U.S. would be better off now if she had become president in 2008 instead of Barack Obama.
The finding in the latest Bloomberg National Poll shows a higher level of wishful thinking about a Hillary Clinton presidency than when a similar question was asked in July 2010. Then, a quarter of Americans held such a view.
This is reflective of two things: first, the economy is bad and people are disappointed with President Obama as a result. With the economy on the ropes, people wonder if a better presidential choice might have made a difference (long answer short: it wouldn’t have).
In addition, there’s the simple fact of Clinton’s absence from the national stage. Unlike every other politician in the United States—and President Obama most of all—Clinton isn’t associated with the flagging economy or some scandal du jour. For that reason, voters can project their fantasies of a better America on her, even if there isn’t any evidence for the proposition.
US Embassy, Kabul photo by Daniel Wilkenson
Jamelle BouieTwitterJamelle Bouie is a Knobler Fellow at The Nation Institute and a Writing Fellow for The American Prospect magazine in Washington D.C. His speciality is US politics—with a focus on parties, elections and campaign finance—and his work has appeared at The Washington Independent, CNN.com, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog at the Atlantic, in addition to regular blogging and analysis at The Prospect. He is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, and lives in Washington D.C, though his heart remains in Charlottesville, VA.