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You might have thought, after a traumatic and gut-wrenching defeat for the Democrats, that the midterms were a nightmare for Hillary Clinton.

Ah, but you dont understand the sophisticated spin at work. The election was actually her dream come true!

Her team has convinced some reporters and pundits or they have convinced themselves that Hillary emerges enhanced from the wreckage.

Im skeptical of that, but Im also going to let you in on a secret: The midterms were probably a wash for Hillary. This whole notion that when a big shot goes out and campaigns for candidates and gets some credit for the victories and some blame for the defeats its a journalistic construct. Most voters dont care about endorsements. Alison Lundergan Grimes loses to Mitch McConnell by nearly 16 points, and Hillary was supposed to have saved her?

No one wants to say that, because it doesnt get you clicks or ratings. So theres a debate: Did the midterms help or hurt?

If I had to choose Id lean toward hurt. But heres what the New York Times says in a front-page story:

The lopsided outcome and conservative tilt makes it less likely she would face an insurgent challenger from the left. Like Hillary was losing sleep over Bernie Sanders?

And a Republican-led Senate creates a handy foil for her to run against: Rather than the delicate task of trying to draw a stark contrast with an unpopular president in whose administration she served, her loyalists say, Mrs. Clinton can instead present herself as a pragmatic alternative to what they predict will be an obstructionist Republican Congress.

Rand Paul and Ted Cruz and their allies in the House will be pushing Republican leadership hard, said Geoff Garin, a pollster who succeeded Mark Penn as chief strategist for Mrs. Clintons 2008 campaign. When that happens, it will give Hillary Clinton or whoever the Democratic nominee is a better platform to run.

An obstructionist Republican Congress? Well have to see. Pure spin, of course. But if youre going to quote the spin from the left, why not include the shots from the right such as Rand Paul saying the midterms were not only a referendum on President Obama but on Hillary?

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KURTZ: Hillary helped by midterm wipeout?

Hillary Clinton visits NH
Returning to New Hampshire, Hillary Rodham Clinton thanked voters Sunday for teaching her about "grit and determination" during her 2008 presidential campaig...

By: WMUR-TV

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Hillary Clinton visits NH - Video

Clinton Fail - The Refinery 11/5/14 (SNIP)
TheRefinery crew discuss Hillary Clinton #39;s massive failures in this year #39;s elections! Also, lots of Lewinsky jokes. Rand Paul #39;s Album of Hillary #39;s Losers - https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?se...

By: The Conservative Union

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Clinton Fail - The Refinery 11/5/14 (SNIP) - Video

Now that two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures, the worlds oldest political party the primary architect of this nations administrative state has some thinking to do.

The accumulating evidence that the Democratic Party is an exhausted volcano includes its fixation with stale ideas, such as the supreme importance of a 23rd increase in the minimum wage. Can this party be so blinkered by the modest success of its third recent presidency, Bill Clintons, that it will sleepwalk into the next election behind Hillary Clinton?

In 2016, she will have won just two elections in her 69 years, the last one 10 years previously. Ronald Reagan went 10 years from his second election to his presidential victory at age 69, but do Democrats want to wager their most precious possession, the presidential nomination, on the proposition that Clinton has political talents akin to Reagans?

In October, Clinton was campaigning, with characteristic futility, for Martha Coakley, the losing candidate for Massachusetts governor, when she said: Dont let anybody tell you that its corporations and businesses that create jobs. Watch her on YouTube. When saying this, she glances down, not at a text but at notes, and proceeds with the hesitancy of someone gathering her thoughts. She is not reading a speechwriters blunder. When she said those 13 words she actually was thinking.

You may be wondering, to use eight other Clinton words that will reverberate for a long time: What difference at this point does it make? This difference: Although she says her 13 words short-handed her thinking, what weird thinking can they be shorthand for?

Yuval Levin, whose sharp thinking was honed at the University of Chicagos Committee on Social Thought, is editor of the National Affairs quarterly and author of two books on science and public policy and, most recently, of The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. He is one of conservatisms most sophisticated and measured explicators, so his biting assessment of Clinton is especially notable:

She is smart, tough and savvy and has a capacity to learn from failure and adjust. But . . . people are bored of her and feel like she has been talking at them forever. . . . She is a dull, grating, inauthentic, over-eager, insipid elitist with ideological blinders yet no particular vision and is likely to be reduced to running on a dubious promise of experience and competence while faking idealism and hope a very common type of presidential contender in both parties, but one that almost always loses.

Her husband promised a bridge to the 21st century. She promises a bridge back to the 1990s. Or perhaps to 1988 and the competence candidacy of Michael Dukakis, which at least did not radiate, as hers will, a cloying aura of entitlement.

The energy in her party in its nominating electorate is well to her left, as will be the center of political gravity in the smaller and more liberal Democratic Senate caucus that will gather in January. There is, however, evidence that the left is too untethered from reality to engage in effective politics. For example:

Billionaire Tom Steyers environmental angst is implausibly focused on the supposed planetary menace of the Keystone XL pipeline. His NextGen Climate super PAC disbursed more than $60 million to candidates who shared or pretended to in order to get his money his obsession. The result? The gavel of the Environment and Public Works Committee is coming into the hands of Oklahomas Jim Inhofe, the Senates most implacable skeptic about large-scale and predictable climate change driven by human behavior.

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Dont believe the hype Hillary Clinton can be beat

She is the leading global voice championing the empowerment of girls and women, but of the eight Democratic women Hillary Clinton stumped for in the 2014 midterm cycle, only one was declared a winner.

She is the prospective frontrunner for her partys presidential nomination in 2016, but of the 26 Democrats Clinton campaigned for in the midterms, 12 won, 13 lost, and one Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana lingers in uncertainty, facing a Dec. 6 runoff election against her Republican opponent.

This cycle marked Hillary Clintons return to the arena of electoral politics for the first time since her failed presidential bid in 2008 secretaries of state traditionally abstain from partisan activity and for those scouring the newly refashioned landscape for indications of how Clintons White House prospects may be affected, the results are decidedly mixed.

Supporters of the former secretary of state argue that, despite having eschewed the rough and tumble of politics for six years, she used her time on the stump this fall to good effect, forging new and strong ties with local party chieftains in states where such connections will prove valuable to a presidential run in two years.

I think Hillary Clinton did yeoman's work in campaigning out there for Democrats, said Patti Solis Doyle, a former Clinton campaign manager in 2008, in an interview with Fox News. She did what she could to help her friends, and very strong Democrats out there. She raised money for them; she campaigned for them.

Solis Doyle emphasized that neither Clintons name nor her policies were on the ballot on Tuesday but that hasnt stopped some of her potential rivals from spreading the word that the big GOP gains marked a major setback for her aspirations. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., the GOPs 2012 vice presidential nominee, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that Tuesdays verdict tells you that shes not inevitable. I think shes very beatable.

More pointed was Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who took to Twitter with unabashed glee to brand the 13 unsuccessful candidates Clinton stumped for Hillarys Losers. The 1990s was a long time ago, Paul said on Fox and Friends on Friday morning. I don't think there is such a Clinton cachet as there once was. ... There is a message here about Hillary Clinton as much as there is a message about the president.

Doug Schoen, a former pollster for President Clinton, dismissed Sen. Pauls suggestions that Mrs. Clinton remains, in the public imagination, tied at the hip to the unpopular incumbent in the White House. This election was a repudiation, first and foremost, as every Republican I've heard say, of President Obama, Schoen said on Fox News' Happening Now on Wednesday. I think that the Clinton brand is separate and distinct from President Obama. I don't think this has an appreciable impact on her fortunes and future.

With long memories of the central role that Florida and Ohio have played in recent presidential contests, Clinton and her Democratic colleagues cannot have looked favorably upon the Republicans success on Tuesday in holding onto the governors mansions in those critical battleground states. Some have argued that she will benefit from the GOP wave by being able to run against the GOP Congress.

Yet in the actual business of campaigning the deployment of rhetoric and charisma to sway persuadable hearts and minds Clintons performance again left some feeling as though she has still not worked out the kinks on display in her rocky book tour this spring. Perhaps Clintons most memorable statement as a surrogate speaker during this cycle was her assertion, during an Oct. 24 appearance in Boston on behalf of (doomed) Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Martha Coakley: Dont let anybody tell you that its corporations and businesses that create jobs.

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Clinton faces tough fight in 2016 after midterms