Sunday, November 9, 2014

Rethinking Hillary 2016: Is She really the best the Democrats can do?

National Review ^ | 11/8/2014 | George Will 

Now that two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures, the world’s oldest political party — the primary architect of this nation’s administrative state — has some thinking to do. The accumulating evidence that the Democratic party is an exhausted volcano includes its fixation with stale ideas, such as the supreme importance of a 23rd increase in the minimum wage. Can this party be so blinkered by the modest success of its third most recent presidency, Bill Clinton’s, that it will sleepwalk into the next election behind Hillary Clinton?
In 2016, she will have won just two elections in her 69 years, the last one ten years previously. Ronald Reagan went ten years from his second election to his presidential victory at age 69, but do Democrats want to wager their most precious possession, the presidential nomination, on the proposition that Clinton has political talents akin to Reagan’s?
In October, Clinton was campaigning, with characteristic futility, for Martha Coakley, the losing candidate for Massachusetts governor, when she said: “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Watch her on YouTube. When saying this, she glances down, not at a text but at notes, and proceeds with the hesitancy of someone gathering her thoughts. She is not reading a speechwriter’s blunder. When she said those 13 words she actually was thinking.
You may be wondering, to use eight other Clinton words that will reverberate for a long time: “What difference at this point does it make?” This difference: Although she says her 13 words “short-handed” her thinking, what weird thinking can they be shorthand for?
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...

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