But she'd look good with a tail!

Remember how, in 2000, George W. Bush benefited from reduced expectations, because everyone thought he was a moron, so when he showed up at the debates with his shirt buttoned correctly, people treated it as if he'd scored a major victory?

Well, via Kevin Drum, maybe all the right-wing blather in the last decade and a half about what an evil bitch Hillary Clinton is will work in her favor, when people see more of her and find that she actually seems okay:

For more than a decade, she has been attacked in a shelfload of books, on countless websites and in repeated direct-mail drives. Her detractors see her as a calculating opportunist with a crisis-ridden past.

Paradoxically, Clinton may be benefiting from that unflattering image as she reintroduces herself.

"If she showed up and doesn't have a horn and tail and speaks clearly and engagingly, people say, 'You know, she's all right,' " said Andrew E. Smith, a pollster at the University of New Hampshire.