Hillary's hill to climb gets steeper

Donald Lambro:

Hillary Clinton's negatives keep climbing, raising new questions about her electability and improving the prospects of her chief rivals for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.
The New York senator's favorability ratings took a nosedive in mid-April, dropping from 58 percent in February to 45 percent, according to latest Gallup Poll. It was her lowest favorability score since 1993. A 52 percent majority of the voters now say they have a negative view of her candidacy. That compares to her closest rival, Sen. Barack Obama, who was rated favorably by 52 to 27 percent.
Mrs. Clinton still held on to her front-runner status in most polls last week, but pollsters and political analysts tell me she is losing the support of strategic blocs in her party's base, including women, liberals and independents, who feel she has waffled on withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. "The recent decline in her image appears to be broad-based" among most key voter subgroups, Gallup said.
Even more troubling for her campaign, the Gallup poll of registered voters (taken April 13-15) also showed Mrs. Clinton losing her double-digit lead over Mr. Obama, who now trails her by a slim 5 percentage points in the survey (31 percent to 26 percent). In other polls, the two are virtually tied.
Veteran campaign pollsters, and many Democratic strategists, shocked by her weak numbers, no longer consider her the unbeatable front-runner. "It's still early in the campaign and it's hard to bet against a Clinton; they're winners. However, the inevitability factor [in her candidacy] is no longer there," independent pollster John Zogby told me.
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Most of her new negativity is from the anti war left. If she gets the nomination they will come back to her. They are not going to vote for a Republican who wants to win the war. She may have been hurt in the first debate, by the fact that Rush Limbaugh said she was the only one who showed much sense on national security. Knowing Rush, he knew he was not doing her any favors even though he was right about her position.