Pulse of America not beating to Hillary's tune

Sunday Telegraph:

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We set out from Portland, Maine, on the north-east coast of New England on a diagonal route to the California port of San Diego in the south-west. The return leg started in the Seattle suburbs of the Pacific north-west and ended at the Atlantic on a beach in Florida, America's most south-eastern state.

In between, we stopped at places such as Wooster, an Ohio town hit by the wave of house foreclosures, Hannibal on the Missouri banks of the Mississippi and El Dorado (pronounced with a "ray" rather than a "rah" in the middle), an oil-boom town in the Kansas flatlands of Middle America.

We spoke to a megachurch minister in Washington state, new citizens in California, a cowboy doctor in Wyoming, a Kentucky country singer in Nashville and believers in UFOs in a dusty New Mexico town. Some interviews were arranged, but most discussions flowed from impromptu encounters in diners, parking lots, bars and shopping malls.

Mrs Clinton might be the frontrunner in the polls, but almost everywhere we went people questioned her candidacy. Many stated bluntly that they did not want a woman in charge. "It's a man's world," said Hugh Laflin, 62, a Kansas truck driver. "Would a Middle East sheikh talk to a lady president?"

A Vietnam veteran in Arizona and a Florida gun-shop owner were among those who made crude jokes about America "going to war every 30 days" under a female president. We never brought up Bill Clinton's sexual dalliances, but many ordinary Americans did. "She couldn't keep her own home together, so how can we trust her to manage America?" asked Micki Martinson, a housewife in Somerset, Pennsylvania.

While we found many people who hated Mrs Clinton, those who loved her were few and far between. Certainly, many said they would vote for her, but the reasons cited tended to be her status as the top Democrat, the fact that she was battle-tested against Republicans and - for some women - the fact that she would be the first female president.

Such support might register in the opinion polls, but could melt away should the former First Lady lose in Iowa. And the frequently expressed nightmare for Democrats is that she will win their party's nomination but lose to a Republican next November when most Americans decide they don't much like her.

"I'm always amazed how we can screw things up," said Steve Ayers, a coffee-shop owner in Hannibal. "Maybe the way we screw it up this time is by nominating Hillary - across the Midwest that would be the only way of unifying Republicans."

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Apart from the war on terror, the issue we were confronted by again and again was illegal immigration - a preoccupation of Democratic as well as Republican voters. "We did everything legally and so should they," said Ljiljana Zezelj, 38, a new citizen from Croatia. "Nothing will work in this country until we secure our borders," said Laura Dietz, a retiree in Phoenix, Arizona.

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There is much more. I think the Telegraph project probably got a pretty good sample of American opinion and the story certainly points out the vulnerability of a Hillary Clinton candidacy. He talks about some of the other Democrat candidates and notes that the anti-Hillary mood does not necessarily translate into happy days for her Democratic rivals. You might say that if she is the best they have, they are in trouble.

Keep an eye on the immigration issue too. The Telegraph was the first to note the mood of the legal immigrants support for Republicans. That has to be a surprise fro Democrats who assumed they owned that vote. If they view immigration issues as a wedge vote they may find themselves with a very small group of supporters.