Why is Hillary Clinton Even Running?
By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
That is not as stupid a question as
it first sounds. Ostensibly we know her four ready answers.
I. Who Else?
One, there is no other credible
Democrat who could run for presidency. The senior party leadership — Harry
Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Dianne Feinstein — is shrill and
buffoonish. They all have either tried before and failed, or are ossified
has-beens — or both. There are no up-and-coming governors with distinguished
records of executive success. There are no young charismatic Democratic
senators — other than the well-preserved, 65-year-old Harvard populist
Elizabeth Warren — out to make a name, who can speak well and mirror image a
Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, or Mario Rubio. Congressional-district gerrymandering that
encourages ethnic chauvinism and hard-left polarization has almost ensured that
there will not be another minority star, like Barack Obama, who can win
crossover votes and statewide office as a springboard to the White House.
II. Her Turn
Two, Hillary Clinton, like a Walter
Mondale, Bob Dole or John McCain, believes that it is finally her turn. In her
case she lost in 2008 and loyally served the man who defeated and often
humiliated her (“you’re likable enough, Hillary” Obama condescendingly remarked
during a debate of Democratic presidential candidates in January of 2008).
She feels that she was robbed of a
sure nomination by the upstart Obama, who cut in front of the line with his
inane “hope and change” banalities and subtle race carding, as if racial
chauvinism must always trump gender pandering. She blew a huge lead in the primaries,
licked her wounds, and now it is time for the party to unite loyally behind her
the way she did with Obama.
III. First Woman
Three, she thinks she can win
largely on the issue of being the first woman president in the manner that
Barack Obama milked his racially iconic status in lieu of a record. Her
supporters believe that they can reignite the old wars: the Republican war on
women, war on minorities, war on immigrants, war on the environment, war on the
poor, war on everybody — and thereby galvanize the supposedly oppressed, as in
2008-2012, to register, turn out, and vote in lockstep in record numbers.
Thereby they will more than make up for the millions of independents and white,
blue-collar so-called Reagan Democrats that she will lose by such racial and
gender histrionics.
IV. Money, Money, Money…
Four, Hillary Clinton assumes that
she can buy her way to the White House and trump even the Obama shakedowns of
the one-percent elite. No one grubs money better than the Clintons, who have
turned a so-so presidential foundation into a money-laundering machine for
their global jetting and politicking.
Both Bill and Hillary have an uncanny insight into the very wealthy of Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall
Street, the Upper West Side, and the Florida coast. They understand the
formula: when many of the rich become very rich they no longer worry about high
tax rates, either on the assurance that they have the capital and know-how to
avoid them, or in the belief that that a 50% federal and state rate could
hardly eat away much of their enormous pile. Huge federal redistributionist
policies may fail and hurt the minorities and poor, but for now they are felt
to be about the only insurance that the gates of the rich will not be stormed
or their private schools and neighborhoods flooded.
The Clintons rightly sense that the
one-percenters in certain fleeting moments feel awfully bad about their
privilege. Thus they will feel much better about indulging their endless
material appetites, if they give large tax-deductible contributions to the
spread-the-wealth, help-the-helpless shtick of elite Democrats. The lifestyles
of Hill and Bill over the last two decades reassure wealthy liberals that it is
OK to wallow in the material good life as long as you pay occasional penance for such indulgence —
and there is no better atonement than helping Hillary Clinton out in 2016 to
speak truth to power. After all, with students facing $1 trillion in aggregate
debt, Clinton marched into UCLA, check-listed some liberal nostrums for 30
minutes and walked away with $300,000 without a complaint — or about $165 in
scarce university dollars for each second of her pieties. In other words,
Hillary is running because she has invested enough in the past that the money
will be harvested as never before in a presidential race.
The Obama Tenure Was Good, Bad, or
Nothing at All?
Otherwise, why is Mrs. Clinton
running at all? She has no agenda. She is not a former vice president like
Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, George H.W. Bush, or Al Gore who ostensibly
promises to continue and amplify, for another four to eight years, the party
visions of a popular and successful president.
Obama is neither successful nor
especially popular. The Democratic Party is calcified. We still do not know to
what degree the party supports the Obama deal with Iran, the Cuba outreach, or
the executive-order mass amnesties. Hillary will not yell out at stadium
crowds, “If you liked the last eight years, I promise eight more years just
like them!”
Will she amplify or ignore her own
Obama administration tenure as secretary of State? Will Americans hear that the
plastic reset button with Vladimir Putin was a good or bad thing?
Will Clinton replay in her campaign
commercials her boast over the deposed and murdered Khadafy (“We came, we saw,
he died”) or her statement about the dead at Benghazi (“What difference does it
make?”)? Or will she fear that the Republicans will use her own words against her?
Will reneging on missile defense
with the Poles and Czechs and ending George W. Bush’s mild ostracisms of Russia
for snatching Ossetia become a neat campaign talking point? Will she brag that we
got all U.S. troops out of Iraq in 2011, or that she helped set the foundations for the current
Iranian negotiations? Were her Arab Spring policies smart diplomacy as
evidenced by the current state of affairs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and
Yemen? Will she say she had a hand in Obama’s “special relationship” with the
Ottomanist Recep Erdogan of Turkey?
Perhaps she can point to her
continual jawboning of Israel as the font for our current distancing from the
Jewish state. Will she remind us that “al Qaeda is on the run”? Will she dare
say radical Islam or will she stick to “overseas contingency operations,”
“workplace violence,” and “man-caused disasters”?
A Domestic Record to Be Proud Of?
Of course, Mrs. Clinton will not run
on her own foreign policy initiatives, such as they were, or her boss’s.
Perhaps, then, she will turn to the generic Obama domestic record of 2009-16.
But then will she praise or promise to reform the IRS, VA, NSA and Secret
Service? Was the massive borrowing of the last administration — greater than
all previous administrations’ red ink combined — a good or bad thing?
Maybe someone will object that
Hillary Clinton is her own person and has no need either to support or distance
herself from the administration that she so loyally served and aided.
What, then, is her agenda, in terms
of economic and foreign policy? More borrowing, more social spending, more
defense cuts, higher taxes still, more restrictions on fracking on public land,
more promises to table the Keystone pipeline? Will she go full bore to promote
cap and trade?
The point is that Mrs. Clinton has
neither a past record that she is proud to run on nor support for an Obama
administration tenure that she will promise to continue. She is not a good
speaker and has a disturbing habit of switching accents in amateurish attempts to mimic regional or racial
authenticity. She accentuates her points by screaming in shrill outbursts, and
dismisses serious questions by chortling for far too long. She is deaf to human
cordiality, has a bad temper, and treats subordinates with haughty disdain. In
that sense she is more authentic than her equally callous and narcissistic, but
charismatic husband.
What Then?
What is then left? Actually one
motif.
Hillary is both a victim and trailblazer.
Her disastrous record of unethical and illegal activities — shaking down
foreigners for donations to her foundation while secretary of State, creating
her exclusive server for a private email account, destroying all her emails
after admitting that she was judge and jury of what were and were not
government records — is instead proof of right-wing McCarthyism.
Those who attack her are afraid of a
woman president and what she represents — an inclusive social agenda that
protects gays, women, and minorities from right-wing hooliganism and religious
bigotry, fire-and-brimstone anti-abortionists who want entrance into our
bedrooms and to erect glass ceilings to thwart feminists, reincarnations of
Bull Connors and Lester Maddoxes who would put blacks back in chains, nativists
and restrictionists who hide their racism by faux calls for border enforcement,
and greedy speculators and stock manipulators who care little for the 99%.
That is Hillary Clinton’s past,
present, and future. There is nothing more. No record — ever — of success, no innate charm, eloquence,
brilliance, or campaign savviness. And given her iconic female candidacy,
her turn, her money — and the lack of an alternative — Hillary Clinton needs no
agenda, whether a past one to defend or a future one to rally to.
The agenda is simply that Americans
are not doing well because of all sorts of illiberal enemies who conspire to
thwart them due to their class, race, and gender — and the nation’s first woman
president will make it all nice.
Don’t laugh. It may well be a
winning formula in the present-day United States
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