Markos Moulitsas: Hillary is doomed? Hardly.

While the insipid media storm over Hillary Clinton’s emails at the State Department might be a big yawn for voters, it certainly is giving some conservatives new hope about their 2016 chances. 

Josh Kraushaar at National Journal led the irrational exuberance, with a piece titled “Why Republicans hold an early edge for 2016.” You see, Republicans are now the favorites because “her least attractive political attributes — an imperial attitude, an inability to avoid scandal, and a penchant for secrecy — are now all taking center stage.” 

{mosads}A Fox News headline blared, “Email flap puts field in play.” The subhead: “The glitter is off Hillary Clinton’s coronation as email controversy prompts new look at alternatives.”

A report here at The Hill said, “Republican strategists say that Clinton’s political abilities have long been exaggerated. They contend she displays an unusual capacity to make trouble for herself and, unlike her husband, has no great degree of nimbleness in getting out of it.”

Oh, and my favorite, from Florida GOP strategist Rick Wilson in the same Hill report: “She’s a terrible politician. She has never won a genuinely contested election. She is spectacularly bad. … She is not a woman who has ever been able to win a hot race.”

Ha ha, all so silly! The email story itself is barely registering with voters, with only 17 percent following the story closely, according to a Pew Research poll last week. Even among Republicans, the number was only one-third. 

That lack of interest is not surprising, given that, one, she didn’t break any laws and, two, pretty much every Republican officeholder running for president has had similar problems in the past. I’m all for laws outlawing such use of private email for official government business, but until those exist, all the hyperventilating is directed in the wrong direction. (The right direction would be Congress, which could pass such a law tomorrow if its Republican leadership genuinely cared about things like “openness in government,” which it doesn’t.)

But more relevant to the “Hillary is doomed!” narrative is the very simple fact that the American public still really, really likes Hillary! In fact, she is such a terrible politician, she isn’t just lapping the potential Democratic primary field, unprecedented in modern political history, she is also crushing her potential Republican opponents. 

On the Democratic side, polling has consistently shown Clinton with leads of 40-plus points against pretty much anyone. While some think this means the “Democratic bench” is weak, really, it means we have our slugger up to bat. So why sub her out? But this isn’t even baseball. It’s tennis. And we’ve got Serena Williams on the court while Republicans have a bunch of ball boys throwing balls at each others’ heads. Call that a “bench” if you want, it’s still a bunch of scrubs. 

When you look at general election polling, Clinton is so doomed and terrible at being a politician that she sports laughably large leads against the best the GOP can throw at her. Jeb Bush? The Huffington Post polling composite (all polls averaged out together, an approach that has proven accurate the last several election cycles) has Clinton leading 52 percent to 41 percent. It’s a 53 percent to 40 percent lead over Chris Christie; 53 percent to 39 percent over Ted Cruz; 54 percent to 40 percent over Mike Huckabee; 50 percent to 40 percent over Marco Rubio; and 52 percent to 40 over Rand Paul. 

So if Clinton really is that bad a politician, and if her chances are really that doomed, then what does that say about her lagging competition? 

Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.