Hillary Clinton’s run for the presidency is driven by a lust for power, a sense of entitlement, and enough conceit to fancy herself the best one for the job. But none of these insures her success. To drive Hillary’s engine of ambition back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will require both high maintenance and high-octane fuel.
To date, the Clinton campaign has been sputtering, even as her handlers insist it’s right on track. Just to make sure, however, they reissued a “let’s do launch” invitation from their candidate to the American electorate. Clinton showed up on Roosevelt Island, in the middle of New York City’s East River, wearing a signature blue pantsuit. She clapped, waved, grinned, and pointed in supposed recognition to the small gathering of faithful. Bill was there in a bright red polo, trying to look inconspicuously supportive. Chelsea and hubby, Marc Mezvinsky, wore shades of white. Together their little family looked essentially like the America flag.
If the choice of colors wasn’t calculated, the rhetoric certainly was. Hillary’s long-awaited debut proved unenlightening but very telling. Before then, she’d been in peripatetic listening mode, nodding her head at selective groups of those “average Americans” she hopes to lift from their misery. With her newly acquired knowledge, it was time for Hillary to lay out a campaign blueprint that highlighted her views on the most pressing issues of our time.
If you anticipated fresh insights, fugettaboutit. In their place was a predictable laundry list of hackneyed generalizations, the biggest of which is that Republican policies are bad and hers are good. No middle ground between party lines was considered. No hopeful concept of moving America forward as a united, determined people. Her message – impure and simple – was vintage Hillary, reminding us that the messenger is the same divisive figure who was dumped by worried Democrats in her last presidential run.
But this time around, Hillary isn’t sparring with another serious Democrat. She’s fighting for her political life against a slew of Republicans, and she will come out swinging. A lot of the swing will be swagger; nobody can be more shrill or more smarmy than Her Heinous. She can gleefully tar the Republican field as a bunch of choirboys singing the same off-key tune, then turn around and pretend to be unfairly bullied by the lot of them.
Nothing would make Hillary happier than to see Carly Fiorina dropped from the GOP lineup…and the sooner, the better. That would admirably serve Hillary’s a-gender, which it is predicated on a Republican war against women and the urgency of electing her the first female president of the United States. Count on her playing the grandmother card at every whistle stop.
Polls show that Hillary is not considered particularly trustworthy. But a candidate doesn’t have to be loved to be elected. All she has to do is convince enough voters to dislike – and even fear – her opponent more than they do her. To this end, she frames her arguments in “us against them” terms. This is a clever move, because it requires no plausibility and gets the most applause from a partisan crowd. I remember Madeleine Albright telling an audience of Wellesley women that they needed to “push back” against Republicans. It obviously never occurred to the former secretary of state that there might be Republicans like me in the reunion crowd. Liberals are like that. They cannot imagine anybody – especially females with a college degree – not holding to the same superior convictions. Hillary is determined to lift to the executive level the puerile charge of Nancy Pelosi that if Republicans took control of the Senate, it would be the end of civilization as we know it.
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We can expect to see this “good versus evil” thread running through the entire fabric of her campaign. The choice she offers will be clear: either you rise with caring Democrats, or you suffer with selfish Republicans. A liberal acquaintance of mine confided that some of the Republican contenders “frighten” her, particularly Scott Walker. Asked why, she said that he had not gone to college. This is untrue, of course, but the main point is that liberals parade as egalitarians until snobbery suits them better. And while it may now be acceptable, for example, to perceive race in other than black and white terms, and gender as something neither male or female, such latitude is not allowed in party politics. For Democrats, the true sign of political correctness is to vote Democratic.