Hillary was the biggest loser

Sen. Rand led a twitter campaign #HIllarysLosers, showing photos of her with her Demo losers - Senators Hagan of NC, Udall of Colorado, Grimes (candidate) of Kentucky, Pryor of Arkansas and (soon to be fulfilled) Landrieu of Louisiana. But many lame-stream commentators claimed she won. ?

Ross Kaminsky pushes back all the happy talk that Hillary won. He takes on their three main points at American Spectator.

1. Liberal claim: By neutering the Progressive wing of the party, the election will allow Hillary to stop selling out to the left.

Reality: Even in comparison to Barack Obama, nobody will buy a rebranding of Hillary as a centrist. She was for Obamacare, then known as Hillarycare, fifteen years before this president shoved it down the throat of an unwilling nation which is still choking on it.

One of the lessons learned by Democrats in 2014 is that their base is disheartened — a mirror image of the lesson learned painfully by Republicans in 2012. In order to raise money, staff phone banks, and get people knocking on doors, Hillary will have to motivate the Progressive base of the party — which she can only do by continuing to appeal to their leftist instincts. Trying to be a bland centrist, much less a near-Republican won’t work for Hillary any more than it worked for Bob Dole or John “maverick” McCain or even Mitt Romney (though Romney had moved aggressively to the right during the primary season).

2. Liberal claim: The election was about President Obama’s leadership rather than Democratic policy preferences, allowing Hillary to campaign somewhat against Obama and portray herself as not seeking “the third Obama term.”

Reality: Of the three claims, this one has the most merit — or at least the first half of it does. The election was as much about Barack Obama’s utter inability to lead and his “my way or the highway” approach to dealing with Republicans (and occasionally even with Democrats) than it was about specific policies despite persistent public opposition to Obamacare. Unfortunately, most independent voters (much less Democrats) are not well-enough informed to have turned against Progressivism more broadly even as they turned against its current leading representative, not realizing that he is that movement’s apotheosis.

So Hillary can attempt to stay close to Progressive policy goals while suggesting that President Obama’s methods were misguided, roughly the same criticism she (not coincidentally) offered of Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky when she penned her 1969 Wellesley College senior thesis on the man. (Two years later she wrote Alinsky a letter asking when Rules for Radicals would be released, calling the book “the fulfillment of Revelation.” Sounds like a good place to start for another Obama term.)

But again, will the public buy it? That depends primarily on whether Republicans can lash her to the mast of the sinking ship that is the Obama legacy just as they did to now-defeated Democrats across the nation last week. You can bet that a “third Obama term” will be a phrase you’ll be utterly sick of two years from today.

3. Liberal claim: Republicans, being led by the nose by Ted Cruz, will govern like out-of-touch extremists, particularly on social issues.

Reality: Can you name a 2014 Republican candidate for a major office who aggressively campaigned against the Supreme Court’s de facto permitting of gay marriage by refusing to hear cases on the subject (something which may soon change with the Sixth Circuit’s upholding of bans on same-sex marriage)?

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