Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Victim and trailblazer

What hope is there for a Democrat to win the White House in 2016? Victor Davis Hanson says that there are mainly two:
Other than hoping for a serious Republican scandal, the Democrats can only cling to two assumptions. One is historic voter turnout by minorities. The second is bloc voting on the basis of racial and gender solidarity.

...Most Americans believe that the era of adolescence is over, and the next president will have to be an adult who puts away the golf clubs and ESPN monitors to clean up what will be $20 trillion in debt and a collapsed foreign policy.

So what is left for Hillary to run on?
There is only the war-on-women mantra that it is past time for a female president and Hillary has the best shot at making it. She is counting on the idea that blacks and Latinos will turn out for her as an icon of oppressed minorities in the manner they did for Obama, and that white working-class voters will forget the Democratic racial and gender pandering that is so often implicitly aimed against them.

Take away the Clinton name, and Hillary Rodham would be no more likely to become president than would Democratic senators like Barbara Boxer and Barbara Mikulski. In her own public and private life Hillary Clinton has had few feminist credentials beyond her self-promotion. She never insisted on pay equity for her female staffers while senator. She did not object much when her husband’s political operatives sought to destroy the reputations of the women with whom he had liaisons — Juanita Broaddrick, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Willey — some of whom made powerful cases that they had been coerced into sexual encounters and then sullied and derided when they complained. For Hillary, if it was a question of believing that her husband had inappropriately solicited sex with a female subordinate or an otherwise vulnerable woman, or ensuring that her own meal ticket was secure, the choice was always a no-brainer.

Hillary has never been a very inspiring candidate. She is petulant when pressed, and appears at once bored and angry when cross-examined. Her stump speeches can be best characterized as high-pitched and punctuated with shrillness. She does not so much habitually lie, as habitually see no problem with lying, as if she either cannot distinguish untruth from veracity, or simply believes that normal expectations of conduct should not apply to herself. Her mea culpas about the e-mail scandal were historic in that not a single declaration that she made could possibly be true: One does not need two smartphones to have two e-mail accounts; Ms. Clinton uses not just one but, by her own admission, four smart communication devices. The physical presence of security guards does not ensure a server’s security from cyber attacks. Bill Clinton does not use e-mail, and thus Hillary could not have communicated with him by that means as she claimed.

...It is either the worn-out idea of Hillary, warts and all, as both victim and trailblazer — or bust.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415464/hillary-or-bust-victor-davis-hanson
Read more here.

No comments: