Poll: Hillary Leads Obama; GOP voters patently insane

You have seen the Washington Post/ABC News poll showing that Hillary leads the field of Democratic candidates. But what do the polls tell us about the GOP contenders?

Poll Shows Clinton With Solid Lead Among Democrats


By Dan Balz and Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, July 23, 2007; Page A07

By a wide margin, Democrats view Sen. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) as the party's candidate best positioned to win the general election, and she holds a double-digit lead over Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in the race for the nomination, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News Poll.

How competitive the Democratic contest becomes could turn on the question of whether voters are significantly more interested in a fresh face or in a candidate they see as projecting strong leadership…

…This Post-ABC News poll also gauged how comfortable Americans are at the prospect of a barrier-breaking president. Large majorities said they would be comfortable with a woman, African American or Hispanic president, but fewer would be "entirely comfortable."

Eight in 10 said they would be comfortable with a female head of state; 86 percent said so of an African American, as did 74 percent of a Hispanic. But fewer said they would have no reservations: Fifty-four percent would be "entirely comfortable" with a female president, 56 percent with an African American and 44 percent with a Latino…

The prospect of a barrier-breaking president is also being entertained by Republican voters. The poll was conducted my me among a random sample of Republican voters just hanging around and bitching and has a margin of sampling error of between two and three percent.

Seventeen percent of GOP voters said they would be “entirely comfortable” voting for a self-styled conservative TV character actor who had worked as a part-time pro-choice lobbyist and had secretly fed the Nixon administration inside intelligence from the Senate Watergate committee when he was supposed to be investigating the Nixon administration, provided he promised to lower their taxes and support family values.

Nearly forty percent of GOP voters said they “somewhat comfortable” supporting a self-styled conservative who had been sitting on the political oil well of the September 11 terrorist attacks when it went off, even if he had appeared at public events with his mistress or in a gold-lame dress and wig, provided he promised to lower their taxes and support family values.

About thirty percent of Republican voters indicated that they were “okay with” a liberal Republican who claimed to have become a conservative about twenty minutes ago, provided he had access to a lot of money and could convince the religious right that he was “not really that Mormon”, and provided that he promised to lower their taxes and support family values.

But only five percent of Republican voters said that they would vote for a candidate who had spent the last two years kissing up to the religious right that he formerly denounced as a pernicious influence on American politics and had vowed to continue a bloody pointless occupation of Iraq, even if he *did* promise to lower their taxes and support family values. The support for such a candidate swells to six percent if he sings “Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the Beach Boys tune “Barbara Ann” at a press conference.

Support for barrier-breaking candidates is not a new phenomenon in GOP voting. Twenty-six per cent of Republican voters still indicate that they would be "entirely comfortable" with a homicidal circus clown as chief executive if he had promised to lower their taxes while actually increasing their tax burden. The same percentage said they would support a vice president that had been regularly lying to them about the progress of a foreign war for more than five years.