Hillary Clinton Is NOT "Inevitable"

by JASmius



For the past two years I have been hearing, from left AND right, that Hillary Rodham Clinton is "inevitable".  She is, we're incessantly told, the "inevitable" next Democrat presidential nominee; she is, we are incessantly told, the "inevitable" winner in 2016; she is, we are incessantly told, going to be the next President of the United States.

And for the past two years, I have been writing and shouting at the top of my lungs, "Oh, no, she's not!!!!"

I have not done so out of wishful thinking, out of utter and complete revulsion at the prospect of what the Right has been fearing for so many years that it has come to almost neurotically embrace it like some sort of twisted talisman.  Rather, I have done, and continue to do so, out of eminently logical and practical reasons that, when one actually dares reflect upon them, completely preclude any possibility that Mrs. Clinton will ever be more than she is right now.

First and foremost, there's no reason to believe that Barack Obama will ever voluntarily vacate the presidency, least of all to accommodate her unrequited power ambitions.  But assume, for the sake of discussion, that he does leave on constitutional schedule at noon EST on January 20th, 2017.  There's also the matter of how The One hates the Clintons, always has, and looks contemptuously down upon them since, after all, he bested La Clinton Nostra in 2008.  There's the fact that he's already expended her as the designated fall "person" for the Benghazi debacle, just as even his genuinely trusted and revered confidante and de facto second-in-command, Eric "The Red" Holder, is the intended sword-faller-oner for Fast & Furious.  And then we must remember that he has already selected his heir apparent - Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) - and is hardly going to sit idly by and allow "President" Rodham the coronational processional he didn't permit her six years ago.

Next, there is....six years ago.  2008.  The Year Of Hillary's Revenge.  On Bill, for putting up with his humiliating philandering for all those years; on America for cutting off her first de facto (i.e. "co-") presidency in 1994 (including shooting down in flames her version of what eventually became ObamaCare) and relegating her to the court jester role of having to count his pecker tracks; and on Republicans....well, just because.  Finally, the decks were cleared, the way prepared, the red carpet rolled out.  The Empress only does sure things - witness her carpet-bagged, gift-wrapped New York Senate seat - and 2008 was both wide open and the most favorable electoral ground for Democrats since the post-Watergate election of 1976.  Her party could not lose, and neither could she.

Except she....did.  Whatever the "legend," the "specter" of Hillary Rodham Clinton, in practice, on the campaign trail, she proved to be a mediocre presidential candidate at best.  Tough?  Perhaps.  Smart?  Not very.  Disciplined?  Maybe.  But none of those traits are what are needed to win the presidency in this garish, hyper-media-ized age.  What is needed is charisma; telegenaity.  All other things being equal, for the past half century, presidential elections have been national beauty contests.  And in the battle for the 2008 Democrat presidential nomination, Barack Obama vs. Hillary Clinton was roughly akin to Jessica Alba vs. "Martha Rae, Denture-Wearer".

In point of fact, her closest historical analogue since 1960 is....Richard Nixon, who was also tough, smart, and disciplined, but couldn't send a thrill up anybody's leg armed with an armory of  tasers and a generator equipped with sarium-krellide batteries.  And, sure enough, Nixon lost to the charismatic, telegenic John F. Kennedy, and barely eked out a win over the equally buzz-less Hubert Humphrey eight years later.  And even that came more from his simply not being LBJ as any pro-Nixon voter sentiment.  And his candidacy didn't have the burden of having served in somebody else's administration and been scapegoated for one of its biggest scandals.

So, to sum up, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most overrated politician of at least her generation, and perhaps in all of American history, and even if she wasn't, her electoral credibility has been decimated by scandal and incompetence, and the political ground on which she would be striving White House-ward (against stout White House resistance) would, after eight years of crushing Obamunism, be orders of magnitude less favorable than that of 2008, on which she failed the first time around.  And did I mention her age and poor health?  And that the Democrats are not a "next in line" party?  And that the Nutroots hate her flabby guts?  And that Team Messiah can swamp even her fundraising resources?  Can all of that really be countered by her "toughness, smarts, and discipline"?

It seems to me that "Hillary!" '16 is analogous to if the "tough, smart, disciplined" Confederate Major-General George Pickett had ordered his troops to stay in their bivouacs and undertaken the doomed charge up Gettysburg's Cemetery Hill all by himself.

And now George Will agrees with me:

The accumulating evidence that the Democratic Party is an exhausted volcano includes its fixation with stale ideas, such as the supreme importance of a twenty-third increase in the minimum wage. Can this party be so blinkered by the modest success of its third recent presidency, Bill Clinton's, that it will sleepwalk into the next election behind Hillary Clinton?

In 2016, she will have won just two elections in her sixty-nine years, the last one ten years previously. Ronald Reagan went ten years from his second election to his presidential victory at age sixty-nine, but do Democrats want to wager their most precious possession, the presidential nomination, on the proposition that Clinton has political talents akin to Reagan's?

A question more and more Americans are going to be asking, across the political spectrum, as the 2016 cycle begins.

But if Mr. Will's dawning conclusion that Her Nib's presidential timbre is suffering simultaneously from mold, dry rot, armies of termites, mange, and the creepin' crud seems devastating, get a load of Yuval Levin's pre-post mortem:

"She is smart, tough and savvy and has a capacity to learn from failure and adjust. But . . . people are bored of her and feel like she has been talking at them forever . . . She is a dull, grating, inauthentic, over-eager, insipid elitist with ideological blinders yet no particular vision and is likely to be reduced to running on a dubious promise of experience and competence while faking idealism and hope — a very common type of presidential contender in both parties, but one that almost always loses."

And then, the Bow-tied One's crushing finisher:

The last time voters awarded a party a third consecutive presidential term was 1988, when George Herbert Walker Bush's candidacy could be construed as promising something like a third Reagan term. A Clinton candidacy make sense if, but only if, in twenty-four months voters will be thinking: Let's have [not a third Clinton, but] a third Obama term. [emphasis added]

Without all the hyped charisma and telegenaity, and the abundance of pigmentation, but with generous helpings of cellulite, loose skin, liver spots, and colon x-rays.

Hearteningly, I am no longer the only conservative pundit who recognizes this eventuality as monumentally, stupendously unlikely.  The only question is how quickly this realization will spread.  Because if it doesn't, 2016 will prove immensely entertaining.

At least, before the coup.