A Hillary Clinton redux in 2024?

OPINION:

A roadside sign for an HVAC business on Coastal Highway, the main thoroughfare in Ocean City, Maryland, for months has plaintively asked passing motorists, “Miss Trump Yet[?]”

Judging by the most recent Quinnipiac poll, which found President Biden — now starting his second year in office — has a job-approval rating of a scant 33%, it appears that more and more Americans do indeed miss former President Donald Trump.

Does anyone remember seeing any such sign in 2018, a year into Mr. Trump’s presidency, expressing similar angst and asking, “Miss Hillary Clinton yet?” Neither do we.

From all indications, however, Hillary Rodham Clinton still agonizes, more than five years later, over failing in 2016 to make history by breaking the so-called glass ceiling and being elected the country’s first female president.

A line of lyrics from Frankie Valli’s 1975 hit song “My Eyes Adored You” — “So close and yet so far” — no doubt plays like an earworm on an endless loop in Mrs. Clinton’s head.

This is the same Mrs. Clinton who, after losing the 2016 presidential election, declared she was “done with being a candidate.” It was reminiscent of what former Vice President Richard Nixon in November 1962 told reporters after losing the California governorship: “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because … this is my last press conference.”

Mrs. Clinton is surely mindful of Nixon’s successful comeback in 1968, and with the Biden presidency in polling free fall, she is reportedly fantasizing about a Rodham redux in 2024. She imagines riding to the rescue of a Democratic Party likely to get its clock cleaned — deservedly — in the 2022 congressional midterms.

That said, who could possibly view Mrs. Clinton, now 74 — who has lusted about being president for at least the past 30 years — as a “change candidate”? Besides the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee herself, that would be Doug Schoen and Andrew Stein.

Mr. Schoen, a longtime Democratic pollster, and Mr. Stein, a former New York City Council president, in a Jan. 11 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Hillary Clinton’s 2024 Election Comeback,” made a risible attempt to help Mrs. Clinton make herself over as a “moderate.”

“Given the likelihood that Democrats will lose control of Congress in 2022, we can anticipate that Mrs. Clinton will begin shortly after the midterms to position herself as an experienced candidate capable of leading Democrats on a new and more successful path,” they wrote.

Mr. Schoen and Mr. Stein wrote that Mrs. Clinton could pull the Democratic Party back to the center from the far-left fringe and insisted that she was the party’s “likely best option” in the 2024 presidential race.

The latter is an unintended backhanded compliment, however, given how weak the Democrats’ presidential bench is: Kamala Harris (Mr. Biden’s vice president, whose job-approval numbers are even lower than his own)? Sen. Amy Klobuchar? Sen. Cory Booker? Secretary Pete Buttigieg? California Gov. Gavin Newsom? Seriously?

Mrs. Clinton’s attempt at reinvention as a moderate will fool no one, except perhaps those who engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. This, after all, is someone who interned as a student with Saul “Rules for Radicals” Alinsky and whose college thesis was titled “There Is Only the Fight.”

Furthermore, there’s no reason to think the Democrat Party wants to be pulled back from the far-left fringe, even if it does get clobbered in November. No such ideological course correction occurred after Democrats lost a whopping 63 seats in the House and six in the Senate in the 2010 midterms or after losing 54 House seats in the 1994 midterms — coincidentally, when Mrs. Clinton was first lady.

Mrs. Clinton’s presence on the political stage is not unlike one of Barbra Streisand’s or Cher’s many “farewell tours.” How can we say goodbye if she won’t leave?