Hillary Clinton lost the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination to Barack Obama, but in one respect she now ranks ahead of Obama. The president's current favorable rating of 56% is down 22 percentage points since January. Over the same time span, Clinton's favorable rating has changed little, and now, at 62%, it exceeds Obama's.
Greg Sargent, who was one of the few rational voices at TPM (the only?) when the WKJM era began, writes this: More interesting, I think, is that Hillary's current favorability rating of 62% is now among her highest ever <http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/president-obama/hillary-popular-again\ /> , rivaled only by her popularity amid impeachment in the late 1990s. Hillary's swings in image and popularity over the years really are truly remarkable, as longtime Hillary-watchers know. After the Hillarycare debacle and the various "scandals" to best the Clintons in the mid 1990s - may of which were fictions kept alive by the mainstream press - her popularity nose dived and she became a figure that stoked intensely partisan passions across the country. [...] Now she's hugely popular again, having carved out a role as a tough-minded Secretary of State who's also a low-profile and dutiful team player. All of which is to say that Hillary seems at her best when she's more of a policy workhorse and in a less overtly political role - yet another argument supporting the notion that she has no intention whatsoever of running for President. As was obvious to all clear thinking people all along, after being subjected to VWRC and pro-Obama fauxgressive smear campaigns, Hillary's approval could only go up when people saw her in action. With Obama, the opposite is true: the Obama marketed to the world could never live up to expectations; the real Obama is the one we've seen on FISA, TARP, Iraq, Afghanistan and healthcare. Everyone knew this a year an and a half ago, but the party took this information and created a new identity that jettisoned sticking up for regular people. It now prefers to serve those who are in office rather than advance the lives of people who need a little help. Gallup: "Hillary Clinton Now More Popular Than Barack Obama" <http://alegrescorner.soapblox.net/showDiary.do?diaryId=3697> by: Pacific John <http://alegrescorner.soapblox.net/userDiary.do?personId=9> Thu Oct 15, 2009
