SOMETHING(S) ABOUT HILLARY

9/8/15

The pundits and the pols have been scratching their heads for weeks, or months, over the popularity of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, populists from opposite ends of the political spectrum.   Why, the pundits ask, would a public that is fed up with the establishment pols be so attracted to two non-establishment pols?   The bar over which one must jump to become an officially recognized pundit must be awfully low, but I digress.

This navel-gazing on the part of the punditocracy came to a heretofore head this weekend on the talk shows that the pundits follow in order to know which mewings to echo or reflexively denigrate, depending on their nominal world view.   One such notable, utterly dumbfounded that the benighted electorate is not flocking to the preferred candidate of the media establishment, Hillary Clinton, offered the sage insight that Mrs. Clinton’s problems with such things as her private e-mail account and the Clinton Foundation “obscure her message.”

Hmm…the allegations directed against her, and, more saliently, her horrific mishandling of those allegations, don’t merely “obscure” Hillary Clinton’s message; they expose her message for the precariously wispy reed that it is.

What is, after all, Hillary Clinton’s message?   It is certainly not an ideological message, or at least not an ideological message that can be easily or publicly distinguished from those of her Democratic challengers.  No, Mrs. Clinton’s message is that she is supremely, indeed uniquely, qualified to be president of the United States.   She is hyper-competent and therefore entitled to the office.   Her country’s needing her would be more obvious if the benighted masses were not so utterly incapable of knowing what’s good for them, which provides further evidence of how badly her country needs her.  

Hillary’s having dropped the ball on the e-mails and joked about serious investigations thereof does not “obscure” this message.   No, these missteps and pratfalls directly contradict this message.   If Hillary Clinton cannot properly manage her own feckless finagling, her image of competence, the very reason for her being, in her mind and those of her fervent followers, the obvious choice for president, falls apart.

On related notes….

Perhaps yours truly is being too glib when he states that Hillary’s only message is that she alone is qualified to be president and that anyone who cannot see that is somehow mentally or morally impaired.   There are two other unspoken aspects of Mrs. Clinton’s message, the “wink and nod” facet of Hillary’s continuing lifelong campaign for the presidency.

The first is that, if Mrs. Clinton has any ideology at all, she is to the right of Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley and thus is an electable Democrat because she is capable of winning the middle.   This message, of course, is never to be spoken of in the heat of a Democratic primary season, any more than the message that a Republican is to the left of his opponents and therefore can win “the middle” is to be uttered in the context of a GOP primary season.

The second unspoken component of Hillary Clinton’s message is that putting her in office would return us to the halcyon days of her husband’s presidency.   As much as many people with whom I agree on most things don’t want to admit it, Mr. Clinton, despite his many, er, peccadilloes, was one of our great post-war presidents, certainly if his presidency is considered from the perspective of peace and prosperity, which is, understandably and justifiably, the whole ball game for most people and certainly for that vast “middle” everyone seems to be courting.   That Hillary would be a Bill redux is a powerful message and, if it were true, would be a very good reason for plenty of people to vote for Mrs. Clinton.  But this message, too, cannot be spoken out loud; the “watch me roar” crowd, supposedly a big part of Hillary Rodham’s constituency, would never brook such a sexist message.

And one more thing…

Hillary Rodham Clinton is often compared to Richard Nixon, usually in the context of disregard for the law and propriety when such piffles get in the way of the all consuming goal of getting the anointed one elected.   There is doubtless something to this analogy.  Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Nixon have (had) credentials that would seemingly make her (him) an obvious choice for president.   She (he) failed the first time around, but only because the American public was temporarily anesthetized by the siren song of a young, dynamic, “different” kind of candidate who ultimately turned out to be far less compelling, “different,” or competent than the electorate’s naïve hopes had led them to believe.   Once the voters sober up, the thinking of both Hillary Clinton and Dick Nixon goes (went), they will return to the obvious choice.

But there is one more point of similarity between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Nixon:  both are about as likeable as cornered rattle snakes.   Likeability may not make one a good president, but likeability certainly helps one become president.   Mr. Nixon overcame his omnipresent similarities to the bad guys on The Three Stooges to become president.   Can Hillary do the same?    

Further, the same “qualities”…the paranoia, the shiftiness, the amorality….from which he had to divert the public’s attention in order to become president ultimately became Mr. Nixon’s undoing.   Will those same shared qualities contain the seeds of the demise of a second President Clinton?