By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, April 07, 2016
Hillary Rodham Clinton says Bernie Sanders is not
qualified to be president. Senator Sanders says Mrs. Clinton is not qualified
to be president. Both of them are correct, but there’s a bit more to the
question.
Mrs. Clinton is a lifelong political grifter who poses as
a feminist champion while riding on the coattails of her husband, an
old-fashioned intern-diddling patriarchal chauvinist who just happens to have
been the most gifted politician of his generation before his decline to his
current diminished state. Like that of Michelle Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s so-called
career in the private sector and in activism rose in neatly incremental tandem
with her husband’s elevation through the ranks of political office. If you
believe Mrs. Obama was being paid three-hundred grand-plus for vaguely defined
administrative work or that Mrs. Clinton’s legal and cattle-futures-trading
careers thrived without their patrons taking notice of the vast political power
accumulated by their husbands, you are a naïf.
Mrs. Clinton over the years did successfully exploit her
marriage to a powerful and vile man into two notable positions of her own:
senator from New York and secretary of state. As a senator, she was — at best —
undistinguished, merely punching the clock as she prepared to run for the
presidency. Unfortunately for her, an equally ambitious nobody senator from
Illinois was following the same program, and he is a better politician than she
is. As secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton was catastrophic: Our allies were
alienated, our enemies emboldened, our diplomats abroad slaughtered like
livestock. Our national reputation is in tatters and our international prestige
greatly diminished, thanks in no small part to her incompetence and that of the
president she served.
On top of that, she managed to violate a half-dozen
national-security statutes, a fact for which she very well may, despite the
best efforts of Obama’s Department of so-called Justice, face criminal charges.
What are her other qualifications for the office? Earning
$6,000 a minute giving speeches to investment bankers? Sanctimony?
Charm?
Please.
Senator Sanders’s own thoroughly bonkers curriculum vitae is hardly more
impressive. He doesn’t seem to have done much of anything at all with his life
until he entered politics full time in his forties. He is the author of a great
deal of political commentary that might be charitably described — charitably! —
as lighthearted meditations on the erotic potential of gang rape. He has
forwarded daft theories that women suffer from cancers of the reproductive
system because of orgasmic insufficiency. His pornographic imagination — Fifty Shades of Red — is some creepy
stuff, indeed. He is in thrall to the usual lifestyle-leftist terrors about GMO
foods and the like.
Senator Sanders presents himself as the great scourge of
Wall Street and the financial sector. But examine his actual legislative record
and you will find almost nothing of any substance proffered on the subject.
Until the financial crisis of 2008–09, his big idea on banking reform was —
sound the victorious trump! — putting caps on the fees banks charge for cash
withdrawals at ATMs. Asked by the editorial board of the New York Daily News — not exactly a bunch of raving right-wingers —
about his stated desire to break up American financial institutions, and
specifically about what legal authority a president might have to do such a
thing, Sanders was unable to name a single law, provision, or proposal
empowering him to do what he proposes. He seemed to believe that the president
could simply order the Federal Reserve — an independent institution — to do so,
and, when challenged about whether a president has that legal authority,
whimpered, “Well, I believe you do.” I’d bet a fair sum of money that the man
who proposes to revamp the rules under which American finance is conducted
could not explain what a derivative is or how a credit-default swap works.
Hell, I’m surprised he has a checking account.
If you’re curious about how this is going to unfold, I
recommend reading Michael A. Lindenberger’s utterly craven assessment of the
kerfuffle in the Dallas Morning News.
Lindenberger insists that Senator Sanders should retract his criticism of Mrs.
Clinton and apologize. That Mrs. Clinton has made the same claim about Senator
Sanders apparently merits no apology. Lindenberger anticipates Mrs. Clinton’s
own first line of defense — cries of sexism — writing: “Women have heard this
line long enough.” As if the fact that some women (mainly female political
allies of Mrs. Clinton) find a line of criticism displeasing means the
criticism itself is invalid. Sure, Senator Clinton voted for an Iraq War that
good progressives such as Michael Lindenberger, Senator Sanders, and Mrs.
Clinton herself now consider to have been a foreign-policy disaster of
world-historic proportions, yet Lindenberger insists that it is somehow unfair
to criticize Mrs. Clinton for “a 13-year-old vote on the war.”
But there is no such thing as a free war, and wrongheaded
military decisions do not mellow with time like a new Bordeaux with too much
bite. Mrs. Clinton has had many opportunities to exercise her judgment and her
keen diplomatic acumen. The results of that are all too plain.
Before the emergence of Bill Clinton in 1992, Democrats
feared with good cause that the immense popularity of Ronald Reagan and the
roaring economic success of those years would shut them out of the White House
for a generation. In terms of qualifications for the office, George H. W. Bush
had the best résumé since Dwight Eisenhower, arguably a better one. But no one
really cares about qualifications. Bill Clinton showed Democrats how to beat
better Republicans, and Mrs. Clinton’s entire subsequent political career has
been nothing more than a tribute to the victories of her husband, an
old-fashioned, back-slapping, horse-trading politician in the mold of Lyndon
Johnson and William Fulbright, Bill Clinton’s awful, segregationist mentor. She
doesn’t have qualifications: She has a reserved first-class seat on some truly
excellent coattails and a great many stamps on her passport.
Bernie Sanders’s political career has been something like
an organic hobby-garden that suddenly overgrows its plot. He was mayor of
Burlington, Vt., essentially a retirement home for addled hippies with a
population less numerous than the membership of Lakewood Church in Houston. He
is a practitioner of the politics of conspiracy theory and class envy, a
professed socialist who doesn’t know the first thing about the laws and
regulations relevant to the issues he says are most important to him. He is
innumerate and economically illiterate, and about one step removed from walking
down Pennsylvania Avenue in a sandwich board. His main qualification is that he
is not Hillary Rodham Clinton, which is a good thing to be in a party whose
most energetic members are sick to death of Clinton Inc. and whose political
infrastructure is divided between an ascendant Obama faction and a moribund
Clinton faction.
Those, in brief, are the qualifications of Mrs. Clinton
and Senator Sanders. White House? She’s more qualified for a jailhouse, and he
for a madhouse.
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