HILL'S RISE IN POLITICS IS OVER: PUNDITS Saturday,February 24,2001
By ANDY GELLER
Pardongate is crippling Hillary Rodham Clinton's efforts to establish herself as a senator and could doom her presidential ambitions, politicos say.
Even a Hillary supporter like Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn) admits, "It's definitely dragging her down. This has not been a stellar career start in the Senate. It's robbed her of her honeymoon."
"It looks like more of the same," said pollster Lee Miringoff of Marist College in Poughkeepsie. "We're right back in the Clinton administration. She's lost her second chance to make a good first impression. People are fed up."
And these were the positive comments.
Listen to what Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, has to say:
"It's the end of her presidential ambitions. And it nearly guarantees that she won't be selected as vice president.
"If she's picked as vice president, it's going to mean a month of scandal stories, and no presidential candidate is going to want that.
"She was a polarizer to begin with," he added. "She's identified with the past, and not the future - with scandal, and not public policy. This is the culmination of thousands of scandals. Finally, we've reached critical mass on the Clinton scandals."
Bill Schneider, a noted CNN analyst and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, spoke in much the same way.
"If the name Clinton comes to mean sleaze, Democrats will want to turn the page and create a new image for the party," he said.
"Right now, Bill Clinton owns and defines the Democratic Party. If a lot of leading Democrats conclude this is bad for the party and new leadership is needed, that new leadership is not going to be named Clinton. This will limit Hillary's influence."
Pollster Maurice Carroll of Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., agreed that Hillary has six years to recover from Pardongate but emphasized the scandal is doing big damage now.
"People have said to me she isn't going up for re-election for five years and she can wait it out, but in the short term, it has to hurt her," he said.
"It will make it hard for her to go to the floor and talk about ethics," said James Thurber, a political scientist at American University in Washington.
‘Kiss the White House goodbye!’ political honchos tell Senator Hillary
-- Ain't Gonna Happen (Not Here Not@ever.com), February 26, 2001