Hillary!
That was the campaign: depending on how you reacted to Hillary! you could vote for anyone (even Trump) rather than Hillary! or were thrilled to send her back to the White House.
Hillary Rodham Clinton probably was going to win the 2016 election. She was given the most disliked opponent in American history who made mistake after mistake. She had more money, big name entertainers who worked for free, and the large DNC machine that had elected Barack Obama twice.
President Obama was not very popular, but he was personally well liked and the economy was doing fairly well. As a former first lady, senator, Secretary of State, Mrs. Clinton was not the most qualified person to run for the office, but she was the most qualified person running in November 2016. She outspent her opponent by two to one. Any sensible person knew Trump could win, but few thought he was likely to win. Clinton was going to win the popular vote, California would make that happen, but surely the blue wall of states that always went Democratic since Reagan-Bush would give her the White House.
Why wouldn’t she win?
Her new book What Happened? sums up her take on why she lost, but also reveals the truth:
It was never Hillary!, but always Hillary?
This is a sad book about a Goldwater girl that decided Tillich was Christian prophet, that he was insightful and not just incomprehensible, and that he had something to say to her generation. She still thinks so, but the world has changed and most of what was once liberal and progressive is now simply incomprehensible to the Bernie Bros or antifa warriors who are growing up around her. Hillary lived just long enough to be wrong even in a community dedicated to wrongness.
Why did the Democrat party nominate Hillary Rodham Clinton after the inspirational Barack Obama?
She had the money. She had the will to power. She had cleared the field.
HRC never realizes that she has grown rich, rich beyond the dreams of Arkansas avarice, in government service and that the rest of us are repulsed. She is always acting for our good. If a child has a problem with bullying, she has a program for the central government to end bullying.
Most of all, HRC is revealed as a person with limited vision . . . an intellect that scored well on standardized tests. She has always done well on standardized tests in politics: against gay marriage when standard, and for it when that was a test of intellectual seriousness. Read the book, if you must, and you will see a person choosing between “a” and “b” when “c” through “z” were available. HRC spends a great deal of the book talking about all the books she has read, but not one has made a difference. There is no shadow of an idea from a deep read of text in any of her anecdotes. They are smart in a conventional sense.
HRC is a talent, a hard working, binder maker. In a college, she would serve on numerous committees and write papers nobody would criticize, but that summed up the conventional wisdom with references to some daring ideas she had found elsewhere.
Why then was she so hated? I think she is right that some of the hate is misogyny. Who would deny this ? Some comes, however, because HRC is so studious, but mediocre. She has earned so little of what she has achieved in politics. She married well and inherited a Senate seat. She lost a nomination she was supposed to win to Barack Obama, and then served him in forgettable style, and finally she could not even beat Donald Trump.
Does anyone other than HRC believe this is mostly because she is a woman? One could name five women in both parties who are better candidates. Try it.
She is hated, I think, because many Americans know she despises them. HRC, like Bill, will sell any position to a poll, but not abortion. She will do anything for the right to kill legally. She cannot understand anyone who disagrees with her worldview. She can cut deals with the political class, but she does not understand anyone who thinks her views immoral. HRC exists in a world of “us” and “them” while proclaiming that nobody should divide the world between “us” and “them.”
If there is any idea that she has swallowed, it is a twisting of John Wesley to justify her do-goodism. If you have a problem, HRC wants to solve it . . . whether is it is socks for chilly staff or another government program to stamp out some evil that offends her. The “deplorables” were right to see themselves as problems she was going to solve and to fear it. They need to change, to move with history, to join the do-good team and HRC would have had a program in place to help reeducate them.
At the end of this book, HRC is, for the first time in her life, pitiable. She was a hard worker sent off to college and twisted by unworthy mentors, shielded from alternative points of view, and dependent financially on a father she scarcely mentions and a mother she outgrew, but adored. HRC sold her Lincoln-Republican roots out for a progressive bowl of soup, but by the time she finally ran for President of the United States had been left behind and she did not get her birthright. She was no longer progressive enough: up to date so forever dated.
The United States will have a woman as President, but it will not be HRC. I pity her for the failure, but thank God for it. In a year many of us considered voting Democratic, the party of Truman and Joe Manchin gave us HRC.
Hillary?
God save the Republic.
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