Looking back over the decades of venomous hatred for this woman, that's a stunning number.
Since it's impossible to imagine that Americans have been tracking Hilary's world tours and admiring her diplomatic finesse, there have to be other explanations for America's reversal of favor.
One likely answer is that Americans don't like politicians, but they do like civil servants, especially ones that shut up, follow orders and do their job. That partly accounts for why the US Military has consistently garnered higher approval ratings than any other federal institution (that, and perhaps because they sacrifice their lives for our protection).
But as my friend Truman points out, it's highly uncertain that those Americans polled even know that Hilary has been a loyal civil servant, let alone the Secretary of State, for the past two years. That begs for another explanation - that Americans (or all humans) simply get a rosier picture of people as time passes.
To anyone who has spent time with an elder reminiscing about the good ol' days, this will be self-evident. (Twenty five years after an acrimonious divorce my father couldn't even remember why his marriage to my "lovely" mother had ended.) In one of the longest - and most breath-taking - longitudinal studies, which followed the lives of 286 Harvard classmen from the 30s, 25% of veterans of WWII reported killing an enemy in a survey taken right after the war; 40 years later only 14% of those veterans remembered that they had taken a life.
But it's not just old people. Studies suggest that for all of us, negative memories tend to fade faster than positive ones. That might be why once reviled presidents like Nixon and Carter (or autocrats like Stalin and Mao) attain a haloed glow as time passes.
It may be that, sometimes, the best way to improve your popularity is to just disappear.
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