Eight years later, it is Clinton who is running for president, and Penn, 53, is her chief strategist. While not her campaign manager in name, Penn controls the main elements of her campaign, most important her attempt to define herself to an electorate seemingly ready for a Democratic president but possibly still suffering from Clinton fatigue. ~The Washington Post

Via Yglesias

This idea of Clinton fatigue has been going around for some time, and I remain unpersuaded that such a thing exists except among all those people who would never vote for Hillary Clinton under any circumstances and who never did vote for Clinton.  Goodness knows, I am tired of Hillary Clinton, but then I am also tired of all of the presidential candidates and it is still only April 2007.  As for everyone else, not only does there seem to be a troubling lack of Clinton fatigue, but there also seems to be an undue level of Clinton enthusiasm (except among the Obamaniacs).  Someone needs to explain to me why the roughly two-thirds of the country that continued to approve of Bill Clinton’s performance as President through his final day are supposed to feel fatigued by the idea of another Clinton.  This is especially unclear when this is after the public has experienced, in all its unpleasantness, the consequences of choosing (twice!) the candidate whose great virtue in 2000 was that he was not tied to Clinton.  Remember the guy who was going to bring back integrity and honour to the office?  So much for that. 

An association with Clinton was once considered in certain circles the political kiss of death, but today it might be a boost.  After what will be almost eight years of Bush, the appeal of some sort of return to something like the ’90s (whose nostalgic value has skyrocketed under Mr. Bush) is probably going to be a lot stronger than many are allowing.  Obama is banking on the exact opposite being true, which is why he has pithced his campaign (rather incredibly) as a departure from the bad, old days of partisan bickering, but my impression of the country’s mood is not so much that it wants amity and bipartisanship as it wants the government to stop enormously screwing up everything it touches.  “Let’s get back to Clinton-era levels of incompetence and corruption!” could be Hillary’s winning slogan. 

All of this doesn’t mean that Clinton would be anything but a complete horror as President, but at the moment I don’t quite understand the argument for why the general public is supposed to be tired of the name Clinton.  It seems to me that some people talk about Clinton fatigue as a way to counterbalance to the very real Bush fatigue that almost everyone has (perhaps it has even reached Barney).  My guess is that those who want to push the “Clinton fatigue” meme the most are the people who feel bitter that Jeb Bush cannot run for President because of his last name.