It is a Big Mystery How Anyone Could Vote For Her

Hillary Can’t Win. Or Can She?



By Bruce Thornton On April 22, 2015  In Daily Mailer,FrontPage 

Hillary Clinton has formally announced she is running for president. Thus begins one of the most interesting and consequential political experiments in American history, one that will unfold over the next year and a half. We are going to see if a candidate for president with no real-world experience, no notable achievements, and no charisma or likability can fool 62 million voters into making her president.

Some may argue that we already conducted that experiment with Barack Obama, but there are several important differences. As a candidate, Obama could at least pretend to be likable. He made all the right noises about “no blue state America, no red state America,” promised “hope and change” for an electorate reeling from two wars and the Great Recession, and sold voters the notion that he would transcend the old politics of government gridlock and zero-sum partisanship. Also, he had a nice smile and could read a teleprompter well.

More important, Obama was just black enough to make voters think that by electing him they could leave behind the old racial guilt drummed into America for the last 60 years, and finally reach the sunny uplands of racial reconciliation and harmony. Thus they were already predisposed to give him the benefit of the doubt and provide him with qualities they so longed for him to possess but, as we learned, he didn’t really have. His lack of practical experience; the long lacunae in his personal history; his dodgy friendships with race-baiters (Jeremiah Wright), terrorists (Bill Ayres), sketchy ward heelers (Tony Rezko), and apologists for terror (Rashid Khalidi); his numerous gaffes blunders, and verbal stumbles; and his record as a dyed-in-the-wool leftist––all were outweighed by the mere fact that he was “black.” Not scare-the-white-folks black, but as Joe Biden said, “The first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.”

That reservoir of goodwill, that desperate desire not to appear “racist,” and that deep yearning to move beyond the racial melodrama, along with a besotted left-wing media covering his flanks, played a large role in getting Obama elected twice, the second time in the teeth of blunders and scandals that would have sunk a Republican, and perhaps even a different Democrat.

But the Obama phenomenon strikes me as a one-off, a fortuitous conjunction of our dysfunctional racial obsessions, grievance politics, multicultural delusions, and the economic downturn. Some will want to blame the Republican candidates as well, and there’s room for criticism of campaigns waged with the preemptive cringe. The question now is, can Hillary put that same lightening back in the electoral bottle?

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