OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
The Democrats have got the Republican dilemma nailed, and the rattle and buzz over Debbie Wasserman Schultz’ tea cups is happy talk that the Grand Old Party looks stuck with a candidate the party doesn’t want.
Mrs. Schultz is the chairman of the Democrats, put in charge of making Hillary’s path to the White House free and clear of all obstacles. Hillary passed the Wasserman test, you might say, only to find that the path Debbie cleared leads to a dead end.
If the Republicans are stuck with Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, the Democrats look more and more every day to be stuck, and really stuck, with Hillary Clinton. Only yesterday she had a 30-point polling lead over Bernard Sanders and the latest surveys now show them to be dead even, and the operative word may be “dead.” The more you get to know Hillary, the more you wish you didn’t. Even Bubba said the other day in New Hampshire that he sometimes wishes he had married someone else, and quickly explained that he only meant that if he had married someone else maybe everyone would believe him when he talks about Hillary’s many good points. We got his drift.
Things are so tough at Clinton Central that Hillary in her panic called in what the jokers there call “the B team,” Sidney Blumenthal, the master of her emails, and David Brock, the conservative-cum-liberal gadfly who eagerly lights on everything that smells like road kill. They’re assigned to finding suitable road kill to assist Bubba in going after Bernie. Mr. Brock has already exhausted his thesaurus passing on ugly things to call Bernie. The most powerful things the B team has come up with to call Bernie so far is “sexist” and “vulgar.” Bubba, for all his roguish charm and disarming bewitchery, is hardly the man to dispatch to call anyone “sexist.” He inevitably looks less the wise statesman, Chester Alan Arthur or William Henry Harrison, and more like that famous frog that first called someone ugly.
Bringing in Bubba followed Hillary’s decision to recruit Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright to retrieve, or try to, the 84 percent of the young people that Hillary lost in the Iowa caucuses and couldn’t get back in New Hampshire. Life may well begin at 80 — it’s the new 45 — but the dowager Playboy Bunny (“Bernie’s young women are there just to find men”) and a secretary of state from a previous century (“if you’re a woman and won’t vote for a woman, go to hell”) seem hardly the goods to inspire the hook-up generation.
But maybe Hillary’s desperation strategy is to win the so-called “war on women,” a figment of feminist imagination, by sending men with reputations for putting women on the rack to seal their imprint on her struggling presidential campaign. Mr. Blumenthal, before he opened his email correspondence with Hillary, talking about the nation’s security secrets on the unsafe email server and recklessly exposing them to hackery by China or North Korea, worked to spin Monica Lewinsky as a nutty stalker of a president lately come to the city and innocent of the wily ways a woman can take advantage of a good old boy like Bubba.
David Brock is the political genius who outed Paula Jones, the heroine of the first of Bubba’s “bimbo eruptions,” as his campaign called them. The Brock outing turned out to be no picnic, as outings are measured, and eventually cost Bubba $1 million in settlements to Mzz Jones, his license to practice law and finally settled on him the honor of joining Andrew Johnson as the two (so far) presidents to be impeached.
The mounting woes of Hillary’s campaign are only now arousing the mainstream media from its drowse through the campaign. At first the mighty organs of the media didn’t see the story because they had so firmly made their case that Hillary was a lead-pipe certainty this time, that the Titanic can sink only once, and anyway, this time she’s not on it.
Now even The New York Times finds the news of Hillary’s troubles fit to print. Drip, drip, drip now becomes splash, splash, splash. Everybody wants a piece of the Clinton collapse. The State Department said Thursday that it is now investigating the Clinton Foundation, and the connection to Huma Abedin, Hillary’s closest aide and confidante. This is the third separate investigation distracting Hillary from her day job, running for president.
The Democrats and their acolytes in the media are still wringing their hands over what the Republicans must do about the Donald and Ted Cruz. Gruff and rough they may be, but nobody’s measuring either one of them for horizontal stripes.
• Wesley Pruden is editor-in-chief emeritus of The Times.
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