Hillary Clinton is the ultimate Washington insider. Thats not necessarily a bad thing.

If there's one thing we learned in the last few elections, it's that people hate Washington. And being associated with Washington is a huge political liability.

Right?Well, maybe not.

Witness this data from Bloomberg's latest poll. The poll asked people about several aspects of Hillary Clinton's resume, and whether they thought each was a plus or a minus.

Almost all of these statementsare some variation on Clinton being a D.C. insider. And Clinton gets positive marks on eachof them.She even gets positive marks for "She has close ties to Wall Street," which is a statement that could just as easily appear in an attack ad against Hillary Clinton.

Clinton's best marks, in fact, are on the only statement actually mentioning Washington: "She has lived in Washington and worked in the federal government"; 78 percent say that's an advantage, versus just 20 percent who said it's a disadvantage.And despite President Obama's approval rating being around 40 percent, about six in 10 Americans say Clinton's work in the Obama administration is a good thing for her.

(Caveat alert: Some people will argue that saying something is an "advantage" for Clinton isn't the same as saying youapprove ofit that it's more a statement of political analysis than personal preference. That might be, but we doubt the answers would be significantly different if it was the latter question.)

Clinton's overall favorable rating in the poll, we would point out, is 52 percent. In other words, plenty of people who otherwise don't really like her think her lengthy career in government and insider status is a feather in her cap rather than a liability.

Those numbers call into question whether it's really a bad thing to be a "Washington insider."We suspect it is a bad thing when the candidates aren't very well-known. In that case, voting for the non-Washington candidate is the easiest way to show your contempt for Congress.

When it's businessman David Perdue versus Congressman Jack Kingston in the Georgia GOP Senate runoff, that "congressman" label probably isn't helpful to people who don't really know Kingston.(We have made this argument before in regards to whether the Republican Party would actually nominate a confirmed tea partier for president. We were dubious.)

When it comes to someone like Clinton, though, it's hard to argue that her being a Washington insider or even a Clinton, for that matter is a massive problem for her.

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Hillary Clinton is the ultimate Washington insider. Thats not necessarily a bad thing.

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