OPINION:
“Have broomstick, will travel” is not how Hillary Clinton’s calling card reads, but it should. The septuagenarian professional politician is swooping over the American landscape in her billowing jackets, threatening to once again lay waste to the presidential election process. Last time around, Republicans were relieved to have survived her reign of error. As All Hallow’s Eve draws near, it is her own Democrats who are faced with uncertainty over what her threatened political resurrection might unleash.
The former first lady cum Democratic presidential wannabe, currently on a national tour with daughter Chelsea to promote “The Book of Gutsy Women” as their new brand of feminism, spooked the party establishment recently with a less-than-subtle threat to upend the crowded field of contenders with her soliloquy on the 2020 presidential election.
“All that matters is that we win,” Mrs. Clinton told an audience of admirers at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon, as reported by news station KGW8. “I hate to be so, you know, simplistic about it. We have to nominate the best . I say all of that because it’s hard to know who’s going to be the best candidate to beat this president, assuming this president is still running. I mean this is a really complicated political environment.”
Translation: None of the current crop of candidates stands head and shoulders above the others, and no one has yet proved to have the chops to beat President Trump. So a certain someone (you know who) might yet prove to be the best candidate.
For the dozen or so Democrats struggling to reach the top of the candidacy heap, Mrs. Clinton’s pointed comments are like an enchanted silver dagger in the heart, or the back. Thus far, the party faithful face a choice of candidates positioned on the left, more left and most left along the political spectrum, each one running on promises to spend money on socialist programs costing anywhere from trillions to tens of trillions of dollars that the nation doesn’t have.
Hillary has singled out Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, for a special spell, charging her with being a “Russian asset,” though offering no evidence: “She is a favorite of the Russians,” Hillary cackled to the Campaign HQ podcast hosted by former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far. That’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she is also a Russian asset.”
So Ms. Stein, whose third-party run in 2016 cost Hillary votes, was a Russian puppet, and Ms. Gabbard, a major in the Hawaii Army National Guard, is too. This from the woman who jeopardized national security when she placed sensitive secrets on an unsecure email server and whose campaign paid for a dossier on Mr. Trump filled with unverified political dirt provided by foreign sources. Nonsense.
To be sure, Hillary has choice words as well for the man who denied her the political prize she craved — and still covets. In recently rehashing her loss to Mr. Trump on PBS News Hour, she raised the possibility of a rematch. “I mean, obviously, I can beat him again,” she boasted. Her peculiar definition of “beat” — winning the popular vote, losing the Electoral College and thus the White House — smacks of the musing of someone seriously out of touch with reality.
Democratic voters have moved on even if Hillary has not. The candidate with momentum is Elizabeth Warren, a slightly younger version of Hillary — blondish, Ivy League-ish, and without the decades of baggage that has left the former secretary of State sagging beneath the weight. Ms. Warren may fall short in her campaign erected upon promises to quadruple federal spending on schools to the tune of $800 billion, and to shake every piggybank from coast to coast for the trillions to spend on Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, but “I’m with her” isn’t going to fly in 2020, broomstick or not.
Hillary’s bold talk of a rematch with Donald Trump is nothing more than a flight of fancy, but her incessant murmurings about getting even are spooking the political landscape. For the sake of her party, the angry lady ought to drop the “Hilloween” routine and save her incantations for those private conversations with the ceiling before bitterness gives way to sleep.
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