Politics & Power Quote by Chuck Todd

McCain needs Hillary to run because she functions less as a Democratic candidate than as a Republican adhesive. Chuck Todd is describing a classic campaign dynamic: opposition as organizing principle. In 2008, John McCain was an uneasy fit for parts of his own party. He was the maverick with apostasy on campaign finance, immigration, and Bush-era pieties. The coalition he needed to mobilize was a patched-together mix of evangelicals, movement conservatives, neocons, libertarians, and party loyalists who did not always like one another - and sometimes didn’t like him.

Hillary Clinton, in Todd’s framing, becomes the shared antagonist who smooths those internal seams. The subtext is that partisan identity often runs on negative energy: fear, resentment, and cultural memory. Clinton carried years of conservative mythology with her - from the 1990s culture wars to Benghazi-before-Benghazi suspicions about competence, ambition, and corruption. You didn’t need to agree on McCain’s virtues if you agreed on what you opposed in her.

There’s a sly media realism here, too: Todd isn’t endorsing the sentiment so much as translating it. He treats “the base” as a weather system, not a deliberative body, and “Hillary” as a symbol more than a person. The line exposes a harsher truth about modern coalition politics: unity is often less about shared goals than about a common villain potent enough to drown out internal arguments.