OPINION:
The day has come. Finally.
Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in humiliating fashion on Nov. 8, 2016. That’s 1,183 days ago. And yet, nearly every day since Election Day, Mrs. Clinton is in the news: Appearing on “The View,” hanging out with Jimmy Fallon, hawking a book with her daughter.
Over these last three-plus years, while traveling the world on a self-pitying, woe-is-me tour, blaming everyone and everything for her embarrassing loss — everyone and everything except herself — Mrs. Clinton has been making millions giving speeches and selling an endless string of books. And at every stop, someone asks her if she’s maybe, just maybe, thinking about running in 2020.
That happened once again last week when she sat down with Variety to pitch her new Hulu docu-series. Asked if she felt the urge to go up against President Trump, she said: “Yeah. I certainly feel the urge because I feel the 2016 election was a really odd time and an odd outcome.
“The more we learn, the more that seems to be the case,” she said, somehow forgetting that her claim that Russia altered the election was completely disproved by special counsel Robert Mueller after a 2½-year investigation.
But the window for her to enter the race is closing fast — and the window is, for all intents and purposes, open just a sliver after Monday. That’s when Iowa held its first-in-the-nation vote. Sure, it didn’t go well and as of press time we still don’t know who won. But we do know it wasn’t Hillary.
On Tuesday, New Hampshire holds its primary. Mrs. Clinton’s not on the ballot there, either.
So finally, after 1,183 days, it certainly seems like Mrs. Clinton isn’t going to run in 2020.
Here’s the good news. Although Mrs. Clinton, with her massive name recognition, didn’t need to campaign like some of the no-names out there, she does need to accrue delegates to win the nomination. There are 41 delegates up for grabs in Iowa, another 24 in New Hampshire. In the two weeks that follow, an even 100 delegates will be pledged in primaries in South Carolina and Nevada. It’s all about delegates now.
Here’s the bad news. Those four states represent just 4% of the total delegates available during the 2020 nomination process in the Democratic Party. While the winner of some or all of those states often carry insurmountable momentum, there have been plenty of candidates who have lost some or all of those states and gone on to win the nomination.
The real drop-dead date is March 3, when 1,344 delegates are up for grabs in what is known as Super Tuesday. In the two weeks following, another 942 delegates will be picked.
Another but: The delegates are distributed proportionally, meaning a candidate who wins 14% of the vote gets 14% of the delegates, and so on. With eight candidates still in the race, it may come down to no candidate winning a majority of the delegates, which means no one would be picked until the Democratic National Committee’s convention in July. Plus, there are “superdelegates,” which carry more weight than regular delegates and, in a skewed 2016 race, helped Mrs. Clinton win the nomination.
All that leaves the window open just a crack for Mrs. Clinton to climb through. And she just recently took the opportunity to take a swipe at Sen. Bernard Sanders, who just happens to be the front-runner for the nomination.
“He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” she said in an interview promoting the new documentary.
Always running.
On Sunday, another presidential loser, former Secretary of State John F. Kerry, was overheard on the phone at a Des Moines hotel laying out what he would need to do to enter the presidential race. “Maybe I’m f——-g deluding myself here,” NBC News reported Mr. Kerry as saying, before setting out his path.
He quickly claimed that he had no intention of running, adding “any report otherwise is f——-g (or categorically) false.”
Like Mr. Kerry, Mrs. Clinton knows that the 2020 nomination could easily be won by a prominent politician. But unlike Mr. Kerry, Mrs. Clinton is just the kind of unscrupulous politician to try to do so, even at this late date.
But I’m here to say — finally, after 1,183 days — that Hillary Clinton is history. She won’t run, not ever again, and she will now simply have to fade away. She has no choice this time, she’s got to say goodbye and disappear.
And for my part, I pledge never to write another word about her. Ever.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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