For those who think Clinton is such a weak candidate and a that a generic republican should've beaten her, see this line:
Clinton’s aggregate raw vote loss in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was around 78,000 votes, closer to John Kerry’s 119,000 raw vote loss in 2004 (if he had flipped Ohio he would have won) than to Gore’s.
A Generic Incumbent Republican President post-9/11 running an anti-terrorism campaign was only able to win by a similar margin.
She may have made up ground lost in rural counties by improving in cities and suburbs, but Obama still managed to keep the margins down in places where Clinton fell through the floor.
Also, do people seriously believe that Clinton is a substantially worse candidate than Kerry or Gore? Clinton basically tied Obama in the '08 primary.
On the other hand, Bush was the quintessential standard-bearer for neo-conservatism. He was one of the few of his era, while most republicans were still more like Mccain or Bob Dole. GWB and Jeb (w/ their politicization of Schiavo etc.) basically paved the way for the standard type of religious-right pandering/hawkish 'generic' republican you see today.
Kerry came close to beating that incumbent generic republican archetype while Romney got blown out of the water. That's how fragile said Bushist ideology is. The Tea Party was an attempt to embrace and court populism, yet the Generic/Establishment Republican plan for the election was to play down those elements and return to Bushism.
The idea that a Bushist would've landslided Clinton when they barely held off Kerry in a post 9/11 environment is ludicrous.
The most popular and well-known woman in the country "basically tied" a first-term senator from Illinois? Impressive.
