{"id":8592,"date":"2015-08-09T21:48:48","date_gmt":"2015-08-10T04:48:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/?p=8592"},"modified":"2015-08-16T21:52:58","modified_gmt":"2015-08-17T04:52:58","slug":"hillary-clinton-reactionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/hillary-clinton-reactionary\/","title":{"rendered":"Hillary Clinton, Reactionary"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Photo
Photo via NRO<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Amid the Trump psychodramas, the public has forgotten not just Hillary Clinton\u2019s latest contortions over her emails, but Mrs. Clinton herself. Hillary has assumed the position of a tired vice president in waiting, without any of the perks that might accrue from a lame-duck president to his dutiful VP.<\/p>\n

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Ostensibly Clinton\u2019s candidacy is to be a continuation of her boss\u2019s eight years. The problem, however, is that for all Obama\u2019s iconic status, the president polls well below 50% in approval ratings. He lost both the House and Senate, and the majority of state governorships and legislatures are now Republican, if not solidly conservative.<\/p>\n

His signature legacies \u2014 Obamacare, the Iran nuke deal, open borders, and massive deficits \u2014 poll poorly. Is borrowing another $8 trillion Clinton\u2019s agenda? Cutting another 25% from defense? No one believes that Obama\u2019s liberal boilerplate \u2014 more government regulation, zero interest rates, higher taxes, bigger deficits, smaller defense, more illegal aliens, greater racial hyphenation \u2014 is working.<\/p>\n

The logical liberal trajectory of abortion on demand is the Planned Parenthood fetus emporium, of race-based grievance politics is the \u201chands up, don\u2019t shoot\u201d (and Trayvon as the son Obama never had) fantasy, of open borders is the murder of Kate Steinle, and of therapeutic foreign policy is the Iran deal, reset with Putin, Benghazi, red lines with Assad, the collapse of Iraq, and the birth of ISIS.<\/p>\n

The result is Hillary is sort of stuck. She can mouth Obamisms that remain unpopular, with the realization that the polarizing rhetoric needed to energize an Obama black or Latino bloc voter in the past had often ensured turning off a working-class Reagan Democrat. Hillary needs to win both groups, but so far there is no indication that her \u201cfirst woman president\u201d theme will energize minorities in the fashion they had flocked to \u201chope and change.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or Clinton can go full-populist, damning Wall Street, the elite, and the one-percent, while again changing accents to reflect regional audiences. Here the challenge is twofold: all three Clintons swim most comfortably in plutocratic waters. Hillary, Bill, and Chelsea are all multimillionaires, precisely because they leveraged their political connections and the Clinton name, in quid-pro-quo fashion, to extract millions from cash-flush Wall Street and banking concerns. The world of the Clinton Foundation, the family\u2019s jet-setting, the Clinton son-in-law, and the speaking fees of all three Clintons are elitist to the core and simply unfathomable to 99% of the population.<\/p>\n

Hillary cannot go to the left of Obama\u2019s record without de facto being critical of it. Any deviation from the Obama orthodoxy might earn a Joe Biden candidacy or a year of leaks from the substantial Obama Chicago-style dossier on her. Obama may assume both a Biden or Clinton will lose, but he would prefer a candidate to tour the country defending his record with an outside chance of winning and perpetuating his legacy than being triangulated by candidate and then President Hillary.<\/p>\n

Hillary can also play the outsider and run on her record as an outlier secretary of State, as if she kept her finger in the dike as the Obama foreign policy collapsed. That is a stretch, because Clinton was central to the Benghazi fiasco. Her fingerprints are all over the Libyan implosion and failed reset with Vladimir Putin. Her naivet\u00e9 about Bashar Assad (\u201creformer\u201d) is infamous.\u00a0 At best she was asleep at the wheel when Obama moved away from Israel and toward Iran; at worst, she was an architect of that transmogrification.<\/p>\n

Given the above, Hillary can run on the promise of being our first female president and try to avoid any specifics and as many interviews as possible. Soak the rich like herself, attack Fox and the right-wing press, warn about the Republicans\u2019 war on women and minorities \u2014 that\u2019s about the extent of her toolbox. She won\u2019t pledge any new tax or entitlement or budgetary reform, and instead will hope that no one cares, as no one cared during the era of vacuous hope and change. If Obama icon-ed his way to the White House, why cannot she?<\/p>\n

But again her first-woman-president theme will be harder than Obama\u2019s first-black-president model. She is nearing 70. She is wise to avoid the press, because she comes off as petulant and cranky, if not confused and self-contradictory in every interview she gives. Her recall is bad and she seems ill-informed about most issues other than offering a platitude or two about fighting for the underdog. In a larger sense, the Democrats themselves seem reactionary: a coronation or inauguration rather than a true primary fight, with far fewer candidates, ideas, and debates than the Republicans have. The podiums were be staffed mostly by older white people who believe it\u2019s their turn, and whose presence is antithetical to their own dogmas about diversity and how we look being more important than who we are. Hillary is a reactionary candidate for a reactionary party. When a septuagenarian socialist like Bernie Sanders cannot speak in Seattle of all places, because further-to-the-left race-mongers hijacked<\/a> [1]<\/sup> the podium, we are replaying the \u201960s not as history, but as farce.<\/p>\n

Whatever one thinks of Republicans and their Trump melodrama, the circus of 17 candidates is lively, full of younger faces and lots of minorities, with a full spectrum of conservative ideas. In contrast, Hillary\u2019s implied message is: \u201cgive me the nomination because I will be the first woman and Bill will try to remember what he did nearly a quarter-century ago. We can\u2019t say out loud that Obama was too leftwing, but privately you know we are winking that he was.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think her candidacy is much more than that. Her nomination hinges on a five-hour work day of light campaigning, doing softball interviews with preselected toadies, shaking down big green, gay, and feminist bankrollers, damning right-wing news, shrilly slurring Fox News, and hoping that she can stay on the Obama reservation and not earn a David Petraeus-like indictment from the Obama Justice Department.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about it.<\/p>\n

But who knows? It might work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Article printed from Works and Days: http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/victordavishanson<\/strong><\/p>\n

URL to article: http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/victordavishanson\/hillary-clinton-reactionary\/<\/strong><\/p>\n

URLs in this post:<\/p>\n

[1] hijacked: http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/tatler\/2015\/08\/09\/blacklivesmatter-protesters-cause-sanders-rally-in-seattle-to-shut-down\/<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2015 Works and Days. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media\u00a0 Amid the Trump psychodramas, the public has forgotten not just Hillary Clinton\u2019s latest contortions over her emails, but Mrs. Clinton herself. Hillary has assumed the position of a tired vice president in waiting, without any of the perks that might accrue from a lame-duck president to his dutiful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[185],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-2eA","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8974,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-many-contradictions-of-hillary\/","url_meta":{"origin":8592,"position":0},"title":"The Many Contradictions of Hillary","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 24, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ Tribune Media Services Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax \"schemes\" in the Caribbean. That is a worthy endeavor, given the loss of billions of dollars in U.S. tax revenue. Yet her husband, Bill Clinton, reportedly made $10 million as an advisor\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/admin-ajax2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8386,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/remember-when-the-left-welcomed-exposes-of-the-clintons\/","url_meta":{"origin":8592,"position":1},"title":"Remember When the Left Welcomed Expos\u00e9s of the Clintons?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 6, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\u00a0\/\/ NRO- The Corner In July 2008 Todd Purdum wrote a devastating and controversial take-down of Bill Clinton for Vanity Fair, outlining the sort of ethical and personal lapses that are back in the news seven years later. The Left largely welcomed the expos\u00e9 because it came\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Opinion"","block_context":{"text":"Opinion","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Photo: President Clinton is sworn in during the Inauguration Ceremony at the Capitol in Washington, D.C. 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Quid\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Hillary Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Hillary Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/public-figures\/hillary-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"(Win McNamee\/Getty)","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/hillary-clinton-scandals-an-exhausting-spectacle-500x292.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":11847,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/colluders-obstructionists-leakers-and-other-projectionists\/","url_meta":{"origin":8592,"position":4},"title":"Colluders, Obstructionists, Leakers, and Other Projectionists","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 29, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness Before the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the idea that the Russians or anyone else could warp or tamper with our elections in any serious manner was laughed off by President Obama. \u201cThere is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Hillary Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Hillary Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/hillary-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9576,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/has-clinton-topped-nixon\/","url_meta":{"origin":8592,"position":5},"title":"Has Clinton topped Nixon?","author":"Megan Ring","date":"November 3, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Town Hall | Another day, another Hillary Clinton bombshell disclosure. This time the scandal comes from disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop computer, bringing more suggestions of Clinton's sloppy attitude about U.S. intelligence law. 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