I am not a Hillary inevitablist, let alone a Hillary swooner. I find her a bit too Third Way, corporatist, and far too conventionally hawkish.
On the other side, I'm deeply impressed with her intelligence, her broad and deep grasp of an astounding spectrum of policy issues, foreign and domestic.
On balance, I feel she could be, by post-modern standards, a decent to pretty darn good Democratic president (yeah, I'm not shooting all that high here).
As for the electability argument, it matters. And, boy, did it just get some amplification 'round my way.
Last week, PPP (pdf) released a poll of 664 Louisiana residents, including 308 Republican primary voters. (That's not terrible weighting, as Dems actually outnumber 'Pubs here, despite our deep reddish cast).
The results, vis-a-vis 2016 presidential preferences, were somewhat startling. Ms. Clinton basically tied (1 point or even) Jeb Bush, Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz and beat Chris Christie by four points, the same spread as a matchup with poor, delusional Bobby Jindal.
These poll results, so far out and from a non-decisive, low-electoral-count state, are the sort of non-data usually best ignored.
But, for one moment, consider the import of this literally fantastic sentence and what it might mean on a national scale:
Hillary Clinton could win the presidential vote in Louisiana.