If Not Hillary, Who?
Last edited Mon Nov 17, 2014, 02:23 PM - Edit history (2)
Charles Pierce at Esquire tackles the thorny problem facing Democrats in the run-up to the 2016 election:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/if-not-hillary-who-1114
Why is it a problem that Hillary is viewed as 'inevitable?'
She has "cleared the field." That's what the smart people say. Without even announcing that she will run for president, Hillary Clinton has frozen the Democratic primary process. She has frozen the media's attention and the energies of the party's activists, and, most important of all, she has frozen the wallets of all the big donors, all of whom are waiting for her to jump to decide what they will be doing over the next two years. It is hard to say she's been unusually coy. After leaving her job as secretary of state, Clinton went on a massive book tour, and she's been a fixture on the high-end lecture circuit, her fees for which suddenly became a campaign issue, even though there isn't a campaign yet. And most significantly, she and her people have begun to distance themselves a bit from the president she once served. She arguably was critical of Barack Obama's "Don't do stupid shit" policy. And when the ISIS threat arose in the Middle East, there were a few strategically placed comments from anonymous "Clinton aides" that were critical of the president for not moving fast enough to meet that new threat. By the standards of the fall of 2014, by the same standards that we judge Martin O'Malley by, Hillary Clinton is clearly running for president. And they say she has cleared the field.
This is what "clearing the field" looks like. This is the conventional wisdom that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is always far more conventional than it is wise. Hillary Clinton has pride of place unlike any candidate in recent memory: She's the wife of a two-term president, a former senator from New York, and the former secretary of state. She has first call on the party's most talented campaign staffers, both nationally and in the states. She has first call on the party's most overstuffed wallets and on every local- and national-television camera from Iowa to New Hampshire and back again. This has been recognized tacitly by almost every other proposed potential candidate. Vice-president Joseph Biden is curiously (and uncharacteristically) reticent. Liberal darling Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts repeatedly has declined to run and signed a letter endorsing Clinton. Everybody else—ambitious senators like New York's Kirsten Gillibrand and ambitious governors like the dark lord, Andrew Cuomo, also of New York—is sitting back and waiting and silently asking themselves that question, running it through their own silent hubris until it produces an answer.
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