The Clinton campaign. Yes. Need to write about it.
No campaign I can remember has been so…phony. But that’s not fair. All of them are phony to varying degrees. Maybe the better word is dull. Few candidates have enjoyed the same level of name ID Hillary does. Everybody knows who she is and everybody has an opinion of her. Her family’s brand of transactional politics is permanent part of the political landscape. No matter how hard the permanent campaign apparatus tries, there is nothing new, different, exciting or vaguely interesting under the Clinton sun.
She has nowhere to go but down. But all of this also makes her somewhat unique among major party political candidates at this stage of the game. She is seen as inevitable, both as nominee and eventual victor in 2016. One has to go back many decades to find a candidate similarly situated. Herbert Hoover, maybe? William Howard Taft? Perhaps U.S. Grant?
Unlike those other inevitables, Mrs. Clinton runs in an era where every word she says and move she makes is instant news. But the bigger obstacle is that her palpable desire for office makes her a ripe target for satire:
It’s funny, which is an achievement for SNL these days. It won’t be the last such send-up of her campaign. And given time, it can erode her aura of inevitability.
But even more corrosive than laughter is indifference. Indifference causes people not to write the checks needed to fund a campaign machine and worst of all, it keeps the marginal voters at home on election day.
One (of many) elements that helped Barack Obama defeat the inevitable Hillary in 2008 was his newness. He was the shiny object that caught voters’ fancies. She didn’t have it. She doesn’t have it this time, though she does not as yet have a challenger who can offer that new, shiny alternative, either. Jim Webb doesn’t have the wattage, but he is intriguing…and undeclared. Martin O’Malley? When he stops carping and actually commits to running, then we can talk.
The alternative will have to come from the GOP side, the Rand Pauls and Marco Rubios of the bunch. Another Bush? Oh, dear. A race between a dowager and a dauphin…pass the NoDoz and cue the SNL bullpen.
