Reply #4: "at various points" is a little different than "consistently", and neither example is valid

[PurityOfEssence]

Junior got some big negatives at various times and for various reasons. He's hardly a great example to hold up, considering that he LOST THE DAMNED ELECTION. This justification shouldn't even be used at all; that election was stolen, stolen, stolen, or as the San Francisco Chronicle said: it fell off a truck.

Clinton won a plurality in a three-way race, which is a lot of the reason the reactionaries never accepted him as a legitimate president. If those circumstances are duplicated with a credible third-party candidate that soaks-off conservative votes by definition, then we should talk about it; otherwise, it's apples and Orange Juliuses.

Not only are both of these examples basically inapplicable, they don't address the core issue of consistency. Bill Clinton fluctuated wildly up with the excitement of the faddish new, down with character issue revelations, up with deft damage-control handling, and he was up and down. Junior took a major hit right at the end with his arrogant unwillingness to even address the drunk-driving issue. Neither was consistently laboring under huge negatives like Hillary and neither was nationally known in his first election, although Junior had name-recognition.

These comparisons simply don't have any bearing on the discussion at hand; she's been a VERY well-known public figure for seventeen years now, and her negatives have been very and consistently high for well over a decade. She got a bit of a sympathy bump from the victim crowd during the infidelity revelations, but other than that, she's got some well-entrenched, powerful and vigorous enemies. That shouldn't necessarily rule out supporting her, but it simply can't be dismissed: a workable strategy for her to be elected needs to factor this in.