RUTHFULLY YOURS

Ready for Hillary, the campaign before the campaign which has churned out some creepy t-shirts and a terrible country song, is $11 million in debt, and Hillary still isn’t ready.

While Hillary was delivering six figure speeches at heavily indebted universities, Ready for Hillary was burning through a giant pile of money trying to stir up Obama level enthusiasm for their uncharismatic candidate by selling fifty dollar champagne glasses emblazoned with a giant H, a Hillary Clinton cat collar and a Hillary Clinton Christmas tree ornament.

Ready for Hillary wasn’t ready to deliver the overpriced crap it was hawking with customers complaining that their items weren’t delivered and that no one was answering their emails. Usually politicians wait until after they get elected to start ripping people off, but Hillary is too broke to wait that long.

Despite advertising a “Hillary for the Holidays” set of Hillary champagne glasses and ornaments, her organization is already $11 million in debt. Apparently not that many people want to scare small children by hanging a Hillary Clinton ornament from their Christmas tree.

Like Ready for Hillary, Hillary isn’t ready. Instead she postponed her campaign until the spring of 2015 after having promised to decide on the first of the year. Back then Hillary was claiming that she would “have to be convinced that I have a very clear vision with an agenda of what I think needs to be done.”

Serious candidates don’t ask someone else to flatter them into believing that they have a clear vision. That’s the opposite of what a clear vision is.

Hillary Clinton spent two decades clearing her way to the White House. If you take her at her word, then she already spent a fortune running for president without ever having a “clear vision” or an agenda of what needs to be done.

Even Hillary isn’t Ready for Hillary.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t like running for things. Instead she likes having them reserved for her. In the White House she got to make policy without running for office. Giuliani’s illness spared her the bother of having to run a real Senate campaign. Hillary got the Secretary of State gig in exchange for backing Obama in ’08 and got frontrunner status for ’16 thanks to her husband’s efforts for him in ’12.

The one time that she faced a tough campaign, she lost.

Now she wants a clear path to the nomination. And then she wants an easy election. Hillary doesn’t want to campaign. She wants to get the job by just showing up the way that she gets a constant stream of awards on everything from Hispanic leadership to AIDS to the oceans by just showing up.

Hillary Clinton is great at receiving awards for doing absolutely nothing. What she isn’t any good at is making a case for why she deserves anything except an indictment.

Her book tour turned into a public relations nightmare despite a friendly press when she made one gaffe after another, claiming to have been flat broke and then trying to paste that over, culminating in poor book sales and a multi-million dollar loss for her publisher. During the midterm election, her campaign appearances helped sink Democratic candidates after she claimed that businesses don’t create jobs.

So instead Hillary Clinton has gone on padding her bank account with highly profitable and heavily controlled appearances at private events. At these appearances Team Hillary scrutinizes and controls every aspect of her appearance from the color of her armchairs to demanding that those who paid extra to be photographed with her be ready and posed so that she can just walk in and out of the photo.

It also dictates that as little as possible of her appearance will be made public. At a UCLA speech, Team Hillary only allowed a two-minute highlight clip to be made public while stipulating that it would have to be taken down before the election. That’s a privilege afforded to her by a university system run by party pal Janet Napolitano. It won’t work that way when Hillary is appearing at a county fair in Iowa.

There will be no censorship, no prestaged photos and no plates of Crudités and hummus. Hillary will have every word out there, she’ll have to smile when the camera is on her and chew corn dogs. For a wealthy and privileged politician who has gotten used to a life of luxury suites and cocktail parties, the campaign trail is a long tall slice of hell. And Hillary Clinton wants to delay it for as long as possible.

The Hillary non-campaign dissuades Democrats from running by convincing them that the nomination is already locked up in her closet along with the awards from Elton John and the Queen of Spain without tempting them into running by showing just how poorly she campaigns. Despite being ridiculously famous, Hillary Clinton is hoping to stay an enigma so no one realizes how clueless she really is.

Ready for Hillary is a third rate version of Obama’s campaign, trying to wrap her in the same aura of history and iconography without having the first clue about such basics as language, design and history. Hillary Clinton’s pre-campaign strategy is to echo what other people are saying. Whenever an issue comes up, Hillary waits until some kind of consensus forms before she offers up her clear vision.

If the consensus changes, so does her vision.

When she does say something controversial, she’s only echoing someone more controversial, as was the case when she ripped off Elizabeth Warren’s “You didn’t build that” rant to declare that businesses don’t create jobs. And then she quickly walked her statement back. That’s Hillary’s idea of a clear vision.

Hillary Clinton’s endless pre-campaign gives her the best of both worlds. Hillary can cash in with little accountability. She can engage the public and the press entirely on her terms. And her political rivals treat her as inevitable because she hasn’t actually gotten into the thick of a campaign. If she had her way, she would announce her candidacy on the day before the election.

And while she can’t do that, she can delay her campaign for as long as possible.

Hillary will be ready to run at the last minute or when another candidate emerges as a serious threat. If any Democrats still think that Hillary will be a change from the golf-and-teleprompter administration, they had better think again. Hillary Clinton may not spend her time on the golf course, but she won’t be spending it doing anything like work either. Her time as Secretary of State showed us that much.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton liked the glamorous aspects of her job, like flying around the world to meet with famous people, but had no use for the boring stuff like dealing with desperate requests for security from her own people in Benghazi. As President, Hillary will follow the Obama itinerary of photo ops with world leaders and celebrities while blowing off the rest of her job and blaming Congress.

Unlike Obama, Hillary is even blowing off her campaign. That’s a level of entitlement too far even for her privileged party.

Hillary Clinton has only two political assets. One is her name. The other is the desperate need by many working class Democrats to believe that the horrors of the Obama years could have been averted if Bill Clinton had won through her and restored the prosperity of the nineties. It’s a sad delusion when applied to a woman who spent the Obama depression partying with the rich while ignoring the poor.

Even now she is delaying her campaign as long as possible to avoid having to mingle with the victims of her party’s economic policies.