David Broder Says Fact That "Establishment Opinion" Has Turned On Bill Clinton Proves Public Has, Too
January 31, 2008 -- 10:01 AM EST // //
This is kind of funny. In his column today, David Broder points to Bill Clinton's current bad press as proof of his own remarkable prescience in predicting that Bill would become a liability for Hillary in the eyes of the public.
But in the process he unwittingly reminds us yet again of his now-complete inability to distinguish between Beltway insider opinion and public sentiment, which of course is what constitutes the silliness at the core of much of his punditry about the Clintons all along.
Broder writes today that there has been "a remarkable shift of establishment opinion" against the Clintons, thanks to Bill's antics. There's no doubt that this is true -- the D.C. establishment hates Bill, as The Politico's John Harris wrote the other day. But Broder then suggests that this shift in "establishment opinion" shows that he was right when he wrote a column a few months ago warning that the prospect of Billary back in the White House will be "a huge problem for the Democrats in November if Hillary Clinton is the nominee."
The thing is, though, that in the previous column Broder alludes to today, he actually predicted that public opinion, not establishment opinion, would turn against Hillary because of Bill. He wrote then that the prospect of Bill in the White House "is a prospect that will test the tolerance of the American people."
In other words, Broder is telling us that the fact that establishment opinion is now turning on the Clintons is proof that Broder was right when he predicted that public opinion would turn on them! We're right back where we started. It just never ends.
Have Bill's recent escapades damaged Hillary in the eyes of voters? Since he got more active, Hillary has won two contests by sizable margins, and lost one by a large margin. The exit polls from those races are inconclusive about Bill's impact. And since then there's been no national polling I've seen on the Bill question. To be sure, Bill has caused a great deal of bad press to rain down on Camp Hillary. Has that bad press damaged Hillary broadly among voters? It's quite possible. But we don't yet know one way or the other.
This really couldn't be simpler: Let the voters decide for themselves what they think, and stop treating establishment opinion as a harbinger of public opinion. If Broder doesn't believe me on this, maybe he might consider listening to former fellow Posties Harris and Jim VandeHei, who recently wrote:
As far as what’s bad, there is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think.Guess Broder doesn't value the opinion of his former colleagues all that much.
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