Did you hear Crystal Ball's rant on the Cycle asking Hillary not to run?

[JDPriestly]

509. But what I am trying to explain is that the questions themselves reveal a bias,

and the judgment as to where the answers to the questions rank people is also subjective. That is why I explained to you that I was one of a large group of people polled by a major polling company. I have stopped answering the polls partly because how anonymous is a poll if the NSA is collecting all your answers? In addition, most importantly because polls in general are very flawed. They try to find out your views on complex issues by asking very simplistic questions and limiting your choice of answers to a very narrow range of alternatives that do not permit the person being polled to think beyond the simplistic boundaries the poll arbitrarily establishes.

If you have a poll near an election in which you ask voters whether they are likely to vote and for whom they will vote, the results may establish a good basis for predicting the outcome of the election. But tests and polls to determine how liberal or conservative a person is that are used 3 years before an election are useless.

The very task of determining what questions to ask makes the test arbitrary. And then the task of ranking opinions as more or less liberal, more or less conservative and then determining whether a person is liberal or conservative and to what degree is absurd. Right now, LGBT issues and race issues could be used as factors in determining whether a person is liberal or conservative. But we all know that many LGBT people and people of very different races are in fact, sometimes liberal and sometimes conservative. A very conservative fundamentalist Christian in some respects might be gay, might belong to a racial minority. That one opinion would cause that person to be rated as more liberal than the person is in fact. The ratings are absurdly subjective. And most of the issue, the overwhelming number of issues you listed as deciding relative liberal and conservative, etc. ratings is based on past rankings of the opinions held by liberals, conservatives, etc. The chart might reflect the categorizations at a moment in time. But it is useless in determining who is liberal and who is conservative according to the situation next year or the year after. It really does not show how liberal or conservative Hillary Clinton will be considered to be in 2016. She is becoming more and more indebted to right-wing conservatives and financial and economic conservatives.

The Clintons hob-nob with the likes of Pete Peterson, the arch-enemy of Social Security. Hillary would have to explain that. The statements that Bill makes in the presence of the Pete Peterson crowd are pretty awfully centrist to conservative.

Hillary started with a shout out to Rajiv Shah, Obama's Chief of USAID and former executive with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It's time for a "new mindset for a new century." She envisions rebuilding USAID into "the world's premier development agency."

http://stateofthedivision.blogspot.com/2010/01/hillary-clinton-speaks-from-peter-g.html

http://news.firedoglake.com/2012/05/16/the-pete-peterson-fiscal-summit-and-what-it-says-about-democrats/