By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Hillary Clinton will not run in 2016 on the slogan of
continuing the hope-and-change policies of Barack Obama. The president has not
enjoyed a 50 percent approval rating since a brief period after his reelection.
And he is no friend of the Clintons.
Abroad, chaos in the Middle East, failed reset with
Russia, leading from behind in Libya, and the deaths in Benghazi are no more
winning issues than are, at home, the Obamacare fiasco, $9 trillion in new
debt, and the alphabet soup of the AP, IRS, NSA, and VA scandals.
The Democratic party has also radically changed in just
the six years Barack Obama has been in the White House, as it suffered the
greatest losses in Congress since the 1920s. 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.
If there is insufficient turnout, or if groups do not
vote in lockstep on the basis of their racial or sexual identities, then —
witness the 2010 and 2014 elections — Democratic candidates can get walloped.
Why?
A paradox arose in Obama’s efforts at encouraging bloc
voting. To galvanize groups on the basis of their race, tribe, or gender, the
Obama cadre has resorted to divisive language
— “punish our enemies,” “nation of cowards,” “my people” — that turns
off independent voters and even some liberal white voters. When the president
weighed in during the trial of the “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman by telling
the nation that if he had had a son, that boy would have looked like Trayvon
Martin, such an eerie tribal appeal bothered at least as many Americans as it
may have stirred. Blacks and Latinos may appreciate Eric Holder’s constant
sermonizing about white prejudice or Obama’s riffs on Skip Gates and Ferguson,
but just as many other Americans do not believe that Gates was singled out on
the basis of race and do not see how the thuggish Michael Brown, who had robbed
a store and rushed a police officer, could conceivably become a civil-rights
hero.
More importantly, there is no indication that Obama’s
knack for firing up minority voters is transferrable in the same measure to
other Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton. Once one appeals to tribal
identity on the basis of race and appearance, one lives or dies with such
superficial affinities. Hillary, in other words, is not Latino or black, and
her winning 60 percent of the former or 85 percent of the latter would simply
not be good enough under the formulaic racial bloc voting that Obama has
bequeathed to Democrats. In addition, Obama seems to bestow voter resentment,
as much as he does enthusiasm, on other Democrats. In 2014, it seemed that
Obama harmed Democratic candidates a lot more than he helped them, especially
when he reminded the electorate that his own policies were de facto on the
ballot.
Nor are Obama’s bread-and-circuses issues catching on.
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. The public seems to accept that taxes can’t go much higher. No one
thinks that borrowing trillions was a sign of government austerity. Too many,
not too few, Americans appear to be hooked on entitlements. The borders are too
porous, not too well guarded. Spiking the stock market was not the same as
creating well-paying middle-class jobs. More gas and oil came despite, not
because of, Obama.
What, then, is Hillary Clinton’s strategy for 2016?
Once again, mostly symbolism. Apart from Hillary and the
idea of the first female president, the Democrats have little to turn to —
which explains why Hillary may well be nominated even if her health and
inclinations — and her disastrous performances — lean against it.
What won Barack Obama the presidency in 2008 was public
anger over the Iraq war, fear following the 2008 Wall Street meltdown — and his
own iconic status as potentially the first African-American president. Had the
surge in Iraq succeeded a year earlier, or had the financial markets not
crashed, or had the Democrats nominated a Joe Biden or a Howard Dean, then they
probably would have lost the presidency.
Unfortunately for them, however, in 2016 there will be no
incumbent Republican administration to scapegoat. “Bush did it” is now stale
after six years. Blaming the Tea Party or the Republican House is likewise old
hat. There is no success story to bandy about — no desire to bring on another
Libya or expand Obamacare or borrow another $9 trillion.
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.
On the face of it, the idea of Hillary Clinton as a
feminist trailblazer should be ludicrous. Forty-four women have already served
in the Senate since the first one did 93 years ago. When Hillary took over as
secretary of state in 2009, there had not been a white male secretary since
1997.
Unlike national female politicians like Sarah Palin and
Carly Fiorina, Hillary Clinton gained public exposure only by virtue of
marriage to the powerbroker governor and then president Bill Clinton. Implicit
in her messaging is a return to Bill Clinton’s economic good times of the 1990s
and the implication that he might well be running half the show — a subliminal
and quite sexist message.
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.
She seems unaware that no one has the right to decide
when or if to comply with federal regulations when leaving office. No one has
the right to be sole auditor of her own compliance with federal law. No other
major Cabinet secretary in the Obama administration failed to have a .gov
account. And on and on and on.
In sum, the Democrats have neither a winning agenda nor
someone to blame this time around. They are stuck with only symbols and icons —
and this time shaky ones at that. In 2016, choosing any candidate other than
the potential first woman president would be as futile as running Joe Biden in
2008 instead of Barack Obama as the potential first African-American president.
There would be no icon, not even a small chance of massive minority turnout,
and certainly less bloc voting on the basis of tribe. In other words, for the Democrats,
2016 would hinge on just defending the Obama record and the principles of
liberal theology — and thereby probably falling short on election day. It is
either the worn-out idea of Hillary, warts and all, as both victim and
trailblazer — or bust.
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