Daily Caller: The Truth About "Electability"
John McCain was electable. Wasn’t he?
Tom Daschle, Joe Biden, John Kerry, Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Keith Olbermann, The New York Times and The Washington Post all said he was. McCain was “a great guy” according to Chris Matthews. So why aren’t we in year four of the McCain administration?
Because electability is absolute, unadulterated, straight-out-of-the-cow bullshit. And I can prove it with two questions.
1.) Did anyone ever ask if Barack Obama was electable?
Potential candidate liabilities: Obama has a weird name. He’s aloof. He’s an elitist. He spent his formative years in Indonesia. His father was a Muslim. His mother was a Marxist radical. He won’t release his college records. He never served in the military. He never held a job in the private sector. He had a negligible impact as an Illinois state senator. He had a negligible impact as a U.S. senator. He had no foreign policy experience. He had no executive experience. He spent 20 years of Sundays with a lunatic pastor who despises America. He’s a product of the notoriously corrupt Chicago political machine. He had close personal ties to domestic terrorists and other unsavory characters.
2) Did anyone ever ask if Hillary Clinton was electable?
Potential candidate liabilities: She’s a left-wing feminist. She’s not attractive. She has a cold demeanor. She’s not charismatic. She and her husband were scandal-ridden and scandal-prone. She had well-known, shady business dealings. Her life’s major political achievement was staying married to a husband who cheated on her every chance he could. She was an unpopular first lady (until the Lewinsky sympathy). Her only major leadership role (Hillarycare) resulted in abject failure, ultimately causing the Democrats to lose their majority in Congress for the first time in more than three decades. She was a junior senator from New York in the second term of a legislative career without much distinction.
And the answer to each of those questions is no.
The list of potential political liabilities for Hillary and Barack could go on for days. Each had an ideology far to the left of mainstream America. Neither had an executive’s pedigree. Yet, somehow, electability wasn’t an issue for them.