We’ve got a presidential campaign that stars one of the most polarizing, divisive and talked-about figures in American life, an international celebrity and lightning rod for all sociopolitical topics going back a quarter of a century.
And she’s become a bystander in this race.
On Thursday, after the usual barrage and tumult of nuttier-than-a-Skippy-factory stories about the Donald Trump campaign, Hillary Clinton didn’t show up until page A15 of that day’s edition of The New York Times, in a story in which she practically begged America, “Hey! Over here! I’m in this thing too!”
It turns out Clinton has some sort of tax proposal. (She wants to raise them.) Nobody cares. It won’t pass. Nothing she says matters. These days she might as well be reading “Twilight” fan fiction at her rallies. She is the first major presidential candidate since James Monroe ran unopposed in 1820 who could spend October of election year in Fiji if she wanted to.
Hillary Clinton, it appears, will be elected president on Nov. 8 and probably by a margin in the “wide” to “vast” range. She has so much money, she’s become Richard Pryor in “Brewster’s Millions,” struggling to unload it all before the deadline. This week she opened a field office in Lubbock, Texas, a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1976.
The enthusiasm about Clinton being the first woman to reach the presidency will fizzle quickly. Indeed, it has already fizzled because the fresh, exciting, renewing aspect of her ascendance is effectively canceled by her persona. She’s a 68-year-old FBI-branded liar who for years has been at the levers of a breathtakingly sordid fee-seeking apparatus in which praising Goldman Sachs in return for $675,000 constitutes among the least alarming maneuvers. “First woman president” implies novelty, and Hillary Clinton is the opposite of that. It implies outsider status, and she gets a nope there too. It implies you blazed your own trail away from the patriarchy, but Hillary would be an obscure lawyer somewhere if it weren’t for her husband.
Get ready for the winner-by-default president. Hillary Clinton’s selling point, and the one that’s probably good enough for America right now, is that She isn’t He. But so is every other person (but one). How many of them could also have beaten Donald Trump? Not only Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren but Al Gore, John Kerry, Walter Mondale and Alec Baldwin must be shaking their heads and wondering why they didn’t run. (Thought bubble over Baldwin’s head: I could have been the stable, even-tempered voice of reason in this race.)
‘Voters can change their minds quickly, but in Clinton’s case it won’t even be clear what they think in the first place.’
Clinton may have been dreaming and scheming for this since she took that job on the Watergate committee, but she still figures to be an accidental president, a beneficiary of circumstance in the same strange category as Gerald Ford. There is much chatter in DC these days about the meaningless, journalist-invented concept of “a mandate,” a voodoo belief that a president elected by a wide margin can do whatever he or she wants.
Voters don’t think that way, though: As soon as Barack Obama started doing unpopular stuff, they remembered they were still allowed to have opinions and opposed his policies, then immediately began installing Republican roadblocks to the Obama agenda starting with the election of Scott Brown to replace Ted Kennedy just one year into the new president’s term.
Voters can change their minds quickly, but in Clinton’s case it won’t even be clear what they think in the first place. A double-digit win, a “Hillary Clinton mandate,” would mean what, exactly? What does she stand for? Her early Flower Power radicalism, best expressed by her trippy Wellesley commencement speech in which she said politics was about opening up “ecstatic and penetrating modes of living”? Her wonky moderate turn in the last six years of the (first) Clinton administration? Her support for the Iraq War and for Wall Street as senator? The sharp turn left she made this summer, after primary season, solely to secure the endorsement of Bernie Sanders? Even Hillary must go to sleep at night wondering, “Wait a sec, which me am I this time?” You can’t vote decisively for a blur.
An astonishing (but kinda not really) NBC News/Survey Monkey poll released this week has her winning the presidential race by 9 points, even though just 42 percent of voters said Clinton has the personality and temperament to serve, just 23 percent agreed that she “cares about people like you,” just 20 percent said she shared their values, and only 11 percent said she is honest and trustworthy.
Your average IRS auditor/ambulance chaser who moonlights as a used-car salesman enjoys better numbers. Unfortunately for Clinton, as of Nov. 9, she will no longer enjoy the benefit of comparison with Trump. Americans are about to get the first landslide president we didn’t want.