Hillary Clinton, Nominee in Waiting
Depending on how things go a year from now, we may look back on the past two weeks as a similar pivot point in Hillary Clinton’s quest for the White House. That was quite a gantlet Mrs. Clinton negotiated, lasting one day longer than her husband’s July sprint 23 years ago. It began on October 13 at the Democrats’ first presidential debate in Las Vegas, continued a week later at Hillary’s old domicile at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., where Vice President Joe Biden took himself out of the running, and ended nine days after the Vegas debate in the crucible of the House Select Committee hearing on Benghazi.
At the first debate, Clinton’s closest challenger, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, voluntarily took Clinton’s email scandal off the table and ended up exchanging a high-five with her over it. In so doing, Sanders essentially capitulated: The Clintons’ secret email system symbolizes Bill and Hillary character flaws—Hillary’s is her only real point of vulnerability—and Sanders said he doesn’t want to talk about it. That translates into not really wanting to challenge her for primacy in the Democratic Party.
Neither did former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who’s apparently running for vice president, or perhaps a post in Clinton’s cabinet. James Webb and Lincoln Chafee, the other two men on the stage, were barely there. They were so outclassed that they quit the race afterwards. Chafee, who had pronounced himself a “block of granite” during the debate, sank like a stone. Webb was so unnerved by the experience he’s leaving the Democratic Party.
That left Joe Biden as the last real barrier to Clinton. But the vice president, with President Obama by his side, announced Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden that he’d run out of time to challenge the Clinton machine. He didn’t put it quite like that; he didn’t discuss the dynamics of the race at all. But Biden seems to have made Bernie Sanders’ same calculation: truly running against the Clintons means not only invoking Benghazi and the email controversy, but also employing phrases and images such as “transparency” and “trust”—and perhaps even “impeachment”—and discussing the $150 million the Clintons have pocketed from book sales and speaking fees since arriving in Washington in 1992. The Clintons always dish out as much as they take, and usually more, so using those tactics necessarily means taking incoming fire, too. Joe Biden wanted no part of it.
The last stop in Hillary Clinton’s tour was the House Ways and Means Committee hearing room in the Longworth House Office Building. There, Mrs. Clinton held her ground against waves of kamikaze Republicans trying to sink her ship. They didn’t come close. Moreover, what those hearings showed, coming in the wake of Biden’s demurral and Bernie Sanders’ docility, is that Hillary appears to be on the verge of inheriting a unified Democratic Party. This is unlike the environment in 2008 when the party was split between Clinton and Obama factions. It is reminiscent instead of 1992.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/10/25/hillary_clinton_nominee_in_waiting_128540.html
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I love that description. Lol. 
