RUTHFULLY YOURS

If the nation weren’t already in a foul political mood, it would still be a special kind of hell to have to suffer through the Bitter Betty Book Tour. But the two things combined together is just so 2017.

If you haven’t noticed, Hillary Clinton is making the rounds to promote her political alibi, What Happened. After watching some of her interviews, it seems apparent that Hillary’s book’s title is giving voice to the question that haunts the old gal day and night (except in her head it probably sounds more like “WHAT THE F*CK HAPPENED?!”). How did one of the best “on-paper” candidates with nearly $1 billion behind her effort still manage to lose the presidency to Donald Trump?

In a lengthy interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night, Clinton reprised her role of victim, martyr, and hero. This is the same Hillary Clinton we have watched for 25 years. Whether it was her failed health care plan, her husband’s infidelity and subsequent impeachment, her 2008 primary loss to Barack Obama, her unforgivable handling of the Benghazi terror attacks or her basement email server, Hillary is the best finger-pointer in a business filled with shysters who have Ph.D.s in Finger-Pointing from Low Politics U.

During the 40-minute pity party, Hillary tried to explain why she is on Cooper’s therapy couch instead of in the Oval Office. She identifies at least a dozen culprits in her Blame Game. The answer to her book’s central question (primal scream?) seems to amount to this:

After Bernie Sanders failed to unify the party—although it was clear in March that I would be the nominee—the Russians went online pretending to be Americans and make up bad stories about me, then they bought Facebook ads at the same time Wikileaks made John Podesta’s risotto-making emails public to cover-up Trump’s p*ssy comments and Jim Comey released his letter that swayed suburban Republican women to vote against me, but all Republicans were undergoing “heavy rationalization” because they wanted tax cuts and a Supreme Court nominee and whatnot, but then again some people didn’t vote which makes me mad and there was rampant voter suppression, endemic sexism and misogyny, and the idiot media. But the worst is the Electoral College amirite? Because it is an anachronism designed for another time . . . and oh, yeah, did I mention Russia?

Clinton pats herself on the back for braving Trump’s inauguration, humblebragging about how she attended out of a sense of duty to our country: “Look, I am afflicted with the responsibility gene. I did the right thing. I knew I had to go. I went to the lunch afterwards, I did everything you’re supposed to do.” She Went to Lunch should be the new, She Persisted.

Clinton bashes Trump’s inauguration speech as “divisive” and a “cry from the white nationalist gut” while again reminding anyone who has been living off the grid since November 8 that Trump did not win the most votes: “He didn’t win the popular vote, he squeaked through in the Electoral College. He had a chance to really fill the role [as president] and it didn’t happen that day.”

Aside from excuse-making and finger-pointing, that signature Clintonesque pathos is Hillary’s most unappealing characteristic. While she cloaks her agenda in the ruse of trying to help future female candidates navigate the bumpy road of electoral politics, this is clearly all about her. Her brand is bitterness, not empowerment. She complains to Cooper that she wants to explore what happened in the election because “I hope nobody ever faces what I faced.”

What is that, exactly? A rigged primary election designed to hand her the nomination? A powerful political structure—three decades in the making—that mostly capitalized on her husband’s name? An obsequious and dishonest national media committed to her victory? (Despite what she says about Trump’s news coverage, take a look at every major newspaper endorsement leading up to Election Day.) Hundreds of millions in easy campaign donations, not to mention immense personal wealth?

Future candidates can only dream of having her good fortune.

America is experiencing a diversity and inclusion conundrum—which, in historical terms, has not necessarily been a good thing. Communities are tearing themselves apart over the statues of long-dead Confederate generals. Controversy rages over which slogan—“Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter”—is truly racist. Antifa street thugs clash with white supremacists in a major American city. Americans argue over whether the USC equine mascot “Traveler” is racist, given the resemblance of the horse’s name to Robert E. Lee’s mount “Traveller.” Amid all this turmoil, we forget that diversity was always considered a liability in the history of nations—not an asset.

Ancient Greece’s numerous enemies eventually overran the 1,500 city-states because the Greeks were never able to sublimate their parochial, tribal, and ethnic differences to unify under a common Hellenism. The Balkans were always a lethal powder keg due to the region’s vastly different religions and ethnicities where East and West traditionally collided—from Roman and Byzantine times through the Ottoman imperial period to the bloody twentieth century. Such diversity often caused destructive conflicts of ethnic and religious hatred. Europe for centuries did not celebrate the religiously diverse mosaic of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians, but instead tore itself apart in a half-millennium of killing and warring that continued into the late twentieth century in places like Northern Ireland.

In multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious societies—such as contemporary India or the Middle East—violence is the rule in the absence of unity. Even the common banner of a brutal communism could not force all the diverse religions and races of the Soviet Union to get along. Japan, meanwhile, does not admit many immigrants, while Germany has welcomed over a million, mostly young Muslim men from the war-torn Middle East. The result is that Japan is in many ways more stable than Germany, which is reeling over terrorist violence and the need for assimilation and integration of diverse newcomers with little desire to become fully German.

History offers only a few success stories when it comes to diversity. Rome, for one, managed to weld together millions of quite different Mediterranean, European, and African tribes and peoples through the shared ideas of Roman citizenship (civis Romanus sum) and equality under the law. That reality endured for some 500 years. The original Founders of the Roman Republic were a few hundred thousand Latin-speaking Italians; but the inheritors of their vision of Roman Republican law and constitutionalism were a diverse group of millions of people all over the Mediterranean.

History’s other positive example is the United States, which has proven one of the only truly diverse societies in history to remain fairly stable and unified—at least so far. Although the Founders are now caricatured as oppressive European white men, they were not tribal brutes. The natural evolution of their unique belief that all men are created equal is today’s diverse society, where different people have managed, until recently, to live together in relatively harmony and equality under the law.

Months of mounting frustration with the lack of progress in the Republican-led Congress drove President Donald Trump to cut legislative deals with top Democrats, according to White House officials, raising the prospect of future collaborations on subjects from immigration to a tax overhaul to spending bills.

In the past week, Mr. Trump has held two private sessions at the White House in which the Democratic congressional leaders walked away with either a deal or a path to one—largely on their own terms. Mr. Trump’s fellow Republicans were stunned by the shift from the president—whose chief interest is in jump-starting the stalled legislative agenda, say White House officials.

In one recent White House session, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was listening to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin beseech congressional leaders to raise the debt ceiling to steady U.S. markets, and the California Democrat grew impatient.

“Wall Street is one thing. You’re used to that world,” Mrs. Pelosi told Mr. Trump and Mr. Mnuchin. “Here the vote is the currency of the realm. It’s all about having the votes.”

In an interview Friday, Mrs. Pelosi said of the White House and Republican leaders: “They don’t have the votes.” She added: “Here we are in the minority…and we’re dealing from strength because they don’t have the votes.”

Mr. Trump has made clear that he is willing to use those Democratic votes to get legislation passed after splits in Republican ranks stymied his promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, White House officials said.

In meetings, he has been apt to criticize legislative leaders, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), for taking a summer recess with so much unfinished business, and to complain of betrayals by GOP lawmakers whose votes he thought were locked in, White House aides said.

One senior White House official described an Oval Office meeting in which Mr. Trump said to him: “What’s wrong with you Republicans?” The official said of Mr. Trump: “Every time I’m in there, he’s like, ‘The Senate can’t get anything done. Why isn’t Mitch working? Why did they go home?’ ”

Mr. Trump now is courting Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Mrs. Pelosi to see if he can propel tax, budget and immigration plans before Congress turns its attention to the 2018 midterm elections.

It’s unclear whether these new partnerships will endure. He once called Mr. Schumer a “clown” and Mrs. Pelosi “incompetent.” Still, “his No. 1 priority is to get the best deal: China, North Korea, Iran, Congress, Republican, Democrat—he’s about deals,” said Sean Spicer, former White House press secretary. “That’s it.”

Immigration has divided the Republican and Democratic parties a lot more than it has united them. That equation was scrambled this week when President Trump had dinner with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi and emerged with the outlines of a deal on Dreamers. The WSJ’s Gerald F. Seib breaks down the odds of bipartisanship on immigration.

Two former top Obama-appointed prosecutors co-author a diatribe against Trump attorney general Jeff Sessions for returning the Justice Department to purportedly outdated, too “tough on crime” charging practices. Yawn. After eight years of Justice Department stewardship by Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, and after Obama’s record 1,715 commutations that systematically undermined federal sentencing laws, we know the skewed storyline.

The surprise is to find such an argument in the pages of National Review Online. But there it was on Tuesday: “On Criminal Justice, Sessions Is Returning DOJ to the Failed Policies of the Past,” by Joyce Vance and Carter Stewart, formerly the United States attorneys for, respectively, the Northern District of Alabama and the Southern District of Ohio. Ms. Vance is now lecturing on criminal-justice reform at the University of Alabama School of Law and doing legal commentary at MSNBC. Mr. Stewart has moved on to the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, fresh from what it describes as his “leadership role at DOJ in addressing inequities in the criminal justice system,” focusing on “alternatives to incarceration,” and “reducing racial disparities in the federal system.”

The authors lament that Sessions has reinstituted guidelines requiring prosecutors “to charge the most serious offenses and ask for the lengthiest prison sentences.” This, the authors insist, is a “one-size-fits-all policy” that “doesn’t work.” It marks a return to the supposedly “ineffective and damaging criminal-justice policies that were imposed in 2003,” upsetting the “bipartisan consensus” for “criminal-justice reform” that has supposedly seized “today’s America.”

This is so wrongheaded, it’s tough to decide where to begin.

In reality, what Sessions has done is return the Justice Department to the traditional guidance articulated nearly four decades ago by President Carter’s highly regarded attorney general, Benjamin Civiletti (and memorialized in the U.S. Attorney’s Manual). It instructs prosecutors to charge the most serious, readily provable offense under the circumstances. Doesn’t work? This directive, in effect with little variation until the Obama years, is one of several factors that contributed to historic decreases in crime. When bad guys are prosecuted and incarcerated, they are not preying on our communities.

The thrust of the policy Sessions has revived is respect for the Constitution’s bedrock separation-of-powers principle. It requires faithful execution of laws enacted by Congress.

A concrete example makes the point. Congress has prescribed a minimum ten-year sentence for the offense of distributing at least five kilograms of cocaine (see section 841(b)(1)(A)(ii) of the federal narcotics laws). Let’s say a prosecutor is presented with solid evidence that a defendant sold seven kilograms of cocaine. The crime is readily provable. Nevertheless, the prosecutor follows the Obama deviation from traditional Justice Department policy, charging a much less serious offense: a distribution that does not specify an amount of cocaine — as if we were talking about a one-vial street sale. The purpose of this sleight of hand is to evade the controlling statute’s ten-year sentence, inviting the judge to impose little or no jail time.

That is not prosecutorial discretion. It is the prosecutor substituting his own judgment for Congress’s regarding the gravity of the offense. In effect, the prosecutor is decreeing law, not enforcing what is on the books — notwithstanding the wont of prosecutors to admonish that courts must honor Congress’s laws as written.

Hillary plays the victim in her campaign memoir, then rips the peasants for not treating her like a man.

Hillary’s campaign memoir, What Happened, is as awful as expected, serving as yet another cracked window on her phoniness. She remains the baby-boomer feminist fraud, still pouting over alleged sexism even as she hurls herself upon various fainting couches.

She writes about her defeat with the emotional intensity of a parent who lost a child — a chilling and neurotic proof of her clawing, bottomless and now forever thwarted political ambition.

She is a failed Lady Macbeth, but a Lady Macbeth who wants us to feel sorry for her, what with her chardonnay-chugging and alternate nostril breathing after the election. She writes: “If you’ve never done alternate nostril breathing, it’s worth a try.… It may sound silly, but it works for me. It wasn’t all yoga and breathing: I also drank my share of chardonnay.”

But in the course of acknowledging her post-election emotional tailspin, she gets in a curious dig at her husband and friends. She wants us to know that she is not as screwed up as they are. “I remember when Bill lost his reelection as Governor of Arkansas. He was so distraught at the outcome that I had to go to the hotel where the election night party was held to speak to his supporters on his behalf,” she writes. “For a good while afterward, he was so depressed that he practically couldn’t get off the ground. That’s not me. I keep going.”

About her friends, she writes that they “advised me on the power of Xanax and raved about their amazing therapists.… But that wasn’t for me. Never has been.”

See, she is still the strong one! It is true that Bill did moon about after his defeat in 1980. He would hang out in grocery stores, following people to their cars as he explained why they should give him another shot. But it is not clear why Hillary thinks that is more pathetic than her frantic closet-cleaning, taking to her bed on election night (while her crying supporters sat stupidly at the Javits Center waiting for her to appear), or any of the other attempts at “self-care” that she reports in the book.

Hillary, when not insisting upon her own claimed superiority, sounds less like Lady Macbeth than Madame Bovary. Hillary, Bovary-like, cops to a frenzied attempt to find pleasure and meaning in the void of her denied dream, in everything from movies, plays, and evening soaps to sentimental books to even religion. “I prayed a lot,” she writes. “I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes.”

They should, especially after she likens her defeat to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. She ludicrously quotes a Methodist minister who told her, “You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming!”

The book is full of inadvertent humor. She pats herself on the back for the generosity that she showed the “4,400 members of my campaign staff” in the midst of her grief, such as when she re-gifted 1,200 red roses to them that a woman’s advocacy group had delivered to her Chappaqua mansion. It sounded less like a gift than more closet-cleaning.

After months of denials, the pretext for Susan Rice’s eavesdropping on Trump officials has finally been made public. It had been widely known that Obama’s former National Security Adviser had contrived to unmask the names of top Trump officials who had been spied on by the administration. And the same media that still treats Watergate as the Great American Scandal had claimed that there was nothing “improper” in an Obama loyalist eavesdropping on members of the opposition party.

Every time Obama Inc. was caught eavesdropping on opposition politicians, it presented its spin in a carefully packaged “scoop” to a major media outlet. This time was no different.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress to protect its Iran nuke sellout, it packaged the story to the Wall Street Journal under the headline, “U.S. Spy Net on Israel Snares Congress”. The idea was that Obama Inc. was “legitimately” spying on Israel, that it just happened to intercept the conversations of some members of Congress and American Jews, and that the eavesdropping somehow meant that its victims, Jewish and non-Jewish, rather than its White House perpetrators, should be ashamed.

The White House had demanded the conversations between Prime Minister Netanyahu, members of Congress and American Jews because it “believed the intercepted information could be valuable to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign.” This was domestic surveillance carried out under the same pretext as in the Soviet Union which had also accused its dissident targets of secretly serving foreign interests.

Obama and his minions had used the NSA to spy on Americans opposed to its policies. Including members of Congress. They did this by conflating their own political agenda with national security.

Since Obama’s spin was that the Iran Deal was good for national security, opponents of it were a “national security” threat.

And its fig leaf for domestic surveillance was that a “foreign leader” was involved.

Now get ready for a flashback.

Susan Rice’s excuse for unmasking the names of top Trump officials in the Obama eavesdropping effort was that they were meeting with the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates. The carefully packaged CNN story, which reeks of the Goebbelsian media manipulations of “Obama whisperer” Ben Rhodes, tries to clumsily tie the whole thing to the Russians. But for once it’s not about Russia. It’s about Islam.

The UAE has become best known for being the first regional Muslim oil state to turn against the Muslim Brotherhood and the entire Arab Spring enterprise. It helped mobilize opposition to the Qatari agenda. The ultimate outcome of that effort was that Egypt was stabilized under a non-Islamist president and the Islamist takeover in Libya is looking rather shaky. The Saudi coalition against Qatar, the sugar daddies of Hamas, Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, has its origins in that effort.

When Obama Inc. spied on members of Congress before, it was to protect Iran. This time around, the gang that couldn’t spy straight was trying to protect the Muslim Brotherhood. The Iran Deal was never about stopping Iran’s nuclear program. It certainly does not do that. Nor was it ever meant to do it.

Instead the real goal of the Iran negotiations was a diplomatic arrangement with the Islamic terror state. The fruits of that arrangement can be seen from Beirut to Baghdad. They are written in blood and steel across Syria, Israel and Yemen. And that arrangement had to be protected at all costs.

Even if it meant spying on Americans. Even if it meant spying on members of Congress.

Let’s begin with a brief flashback. On March 22, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes conducted a bizarre press conference on White House grounds. His claim? That Obama-administration officials had monitored members of the incoming Trump administration as part of routine surveillance of foreign officials.

The whole episode was strange enough that it ultimately led Nunes to recuse himself from the Russia probe. After all, he’d gone to White House grounds to “brief” the president on information he’d obtained from the White House. He did so without sharing that information with his committee and as part of a transparent effort to help the Trump administration muddle through one of its many self-imposed public firestorms. (In March, Trump had tweeted claims that Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower before the election.) In short, he did the wrong thing the wrong way.

But that didn’t mean that all of Nunes’s claims were wrong. He asserted that he’d seen evidence that Obama administration officials had “unmasked,” or disclosed in intelligence reports, the identities of Trump officials who met or communicated with representatives of foreign governments and that “none of this surveillance was related to Russia.” These were serious claims, and while they may not involve criminal behavior (“unmasking” isn’t a criminal offense), it would be highly improper — corrupt, even — to abuse America’s national-security resources for partisan political advantage.

Former national-security adviser Susan Rice was at the center of the storm, accused of making a vast number of unmasking requests. What was her response? On the very day of Nunes’s press conference she said, “I know nothing about this. I was surprised to see reports from Chairman Nunes on that count today.”

Here’s the video:

Over time, however, her story evolved. She later clarified that she was simply saying that she didn’t know “what reports Nunes was referring to.” In April she said she never did anything “untoward with respect to the intelligence” she received. So, what was the truth? Did she “know nothing” or did she do nothing “untoward”? Those aren’t the same statements, and the differences matter.

Let’s flash forward to yesterday. Lost amidst the news of the Trump “deal” with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer was this little scoop from CNN:

Former national security adviser Susan Rice privately told House investigators that she unmasked the identities of senior Trump officials to understand why the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates was in New York late last year, multiple sources told CNN.

Allegedly, the meeting happened before the UAE tried to “facilitate a back-channel” between Russia and Trump transition officials. The story continues:

The Obama administration felt misled by the United Arab Emirates, which had failed to mention that Zayed was coming to the United States even though it’s customary for foreign dignitaries to notify the US government about their travels, according to several sources familiar with the matter. Rice, who served as then-President Obama’s national security adviser in his second term, told the House Intelligence Committee last week that she requested the names of the Americans mentioned in the classified report be revealed internally, a practice officials in both parties say is common.

President Trump had dinner Wednesday night with Chuck and Nancy, as he familiarly calls the Democratic leaders he apparently hopes will become his new governing partners.

Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi left the repast and promptly announced that they had reached a deal with the president over codifying DACA. According to the Democrats, they had agreed with the president to seek legislation that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrants once covered under DACA in exchange for unspecified border-security measures, but not funding for “the wall.” Trump denied there was actually a deal, but confirmed the basic structure of a prospective agreement. According to Trump, DACA will be reinstituted in exchange for “massive” and “extreme” new border security, but not funding for the wall.

Who knows what will ultimately come of this, but it’s not encouraging. Since announcing the end of DACA, Trump has signaled that merely writing its provisions in legislation would constitute a triumph. But the point of rescinding DACA was not just to enshrine it into law via constitutional means (which is certainly better than the alternative). The point was also to extract concessions from Democrats that would create a better immigration system and cushion the effect of the amnesty. Almost from the beginning, Trump has undermined his own leverage and made this less likely.

As we’ve argued repeatedly, a sensible deal isn’t hard to discern. The problem with any amnesty is that it serves as a magnet for new illegal immigrants, and its recipients could become the next link in chain migration if granted legal status or especially citizenship. Pairing an amnesty for so-called Dreamers with some combination of a mandatory E-Verify for new hires and portions of the RAISE Act that will reduce chain migration would directly address the negative consequences of codifying a version of DACA.

The legislation that Trump, Schumer, and Pelosi are talking about would likely do neither. Trump wouldn’t even get funding for his signature border wall. (The wall is largely symbolism, and a trade of a permanent amnesty for some one-time funding for the wall would be a bad deal.) The parameters of this agreement appear to be about what you would expect from a negotiation between Schumer and Pelosi on one hand and Trump on the other. The Democrats are opposed to any meaningful tightening of the immigration system — they want to go in the opposite direction — while Trump has been a restrictionist, although one not well-versed in the policy implications of that position, to put it mildly.

We hope that the White House realizes what a mistake this deal would be, and failing that, that the Republican congressional leadership, with a push from immigration hawks, puts the kibosh on it and demands something better. Whatever Trump might think, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi aren’t his friends, and certainly aren’t the friends of sound immigration policy.

A clearer picture is coming into focus on the Democrat IT scandal that may help explain why Democrats have been so reluctant to condemn the Awans or help the police with the investigation. It also might explain why former DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been so jumpy lately.

New information about a massive cybersecurity breach, gleaned from a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation, implicates the former chair of the House Democratic Caucus, then-Rep. Xavier Becerra, who is now the attorney general of California and a rising star in Democrat politics.

This scandal isn’t about bank fraud, folks.

Kudos to Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller for chasing down this story, even as the Democrat media complex either poo-pooed or ignored the growing scandal. As Ace of Spades noted, at some point the legacy media is going to have the explain to their audiences why they didn’t report on this major story all year long.

Via the Daily Caller:

A secret server is behind law enforcement’s decision to ban a former IT aide to Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz from the House network.

Now-indicted former congressional IT aide Imran Awan allegedly routed data from numerous House Democrats to a secret server. Police grew suspicious and requested a copy of the server early this year, but they were provided with an elaborate falsified image designed to hide the massive violations. The falsified image is what ultimately triggered their ban from the House network Feb. 2, according to a senior House official with direct knowledge of the investigation.

The secret server was connected to the House Democratic Caucus, an organization chaired by then-Rep. Xavier Becerra. Police informed Becerra that the server was the subject of an investigation and requested a copy of it. Authorities considered the false image they received to be interference in a criminal investigation, the senior official said.

Data was also backed up to Dropbox in huge quantities, the official said. Congressional offices are prohibited from using Dropbox, so an unofficial account was used, meaning Awan could have still had access to the data even though he was banned from the congressional network.

Awan had access to all emails and office computer files of 45 members of Congress who are listed below. Fear among members that Awan could release embarrassing information if they cooperated with prosecutors could explain why the Democrats have refused to acknowledge the cybersecurity breach publicly or criticize the suspects.

According to the DCNF’s source, the Awans’ use of Dropbox went well beyond casual use. They were “funneling of huge quantities of data offsite where it could not be taken back by House authorities.”

Wasserman-Schultz kept Imran Awan on even after he was banned from using official computers, and only fired him after he was arrested at the airport back in July as he was trying to abscond to Pakistan. In May, she threatened the capitol police chief with “consequences” if he didn’t return her confiscated laptop.

Imran Awan’s wife, Hina Alvi, who has been in Pakistan for months, has struck a deal with federal prosecutors, agreeing to return to the U.S. and face charges. Alvi was also an IT staffer for House Democrats. CONTINUE AT SITE

Republicans have issues, but Democrats have them too. Witness the two individuals who dominated this week’s news—and who conveniently represent the left’s most crippling problems.

Hillary Clinton is again everywhere, touting her new memoir and adding to the list of who and what are to blame for her loss: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, James Comey, Jill Stein, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Anthony Weiner, sexism, misogyny, the New York Times , lazy women, liberal activists and the “godforsaken Electoral College.” All she’s missing is climate change.

Hillary’s take on “What Happened” has unsurprisingly unleashed another round of analysis about her mistakes—Wisconsin, deplorables, email. These sorts of detailed postmortems of failed campaigns are popular, but they tend to obscure the bigger reasons for failure. In this case: The Democratic Party saddled itself with an ethically compromised and joyless candidate, because it had nobody else.

Hillary spent eight years planning her first presidential bid, and the next eight warning Democrats not to get in the way of her second. The Clinton Foundation was erected to serve as bank and Rolodex, and to enable the Clintons to retain their grip over the party. And that party was committed to a Clinton coronation, right up to Mr. Sanders’s cheeky assault.

Mr. Obama aided Mrs. Clinton’s ambitions by decimating his party. By the time Barack Obama finished his eight years in office, his party held 65 fewer House seats, 14 fewer governorships and controlled 30 fewer state legislatures. It had turned a once-filibuster-proof Senate majority into minority status. The big-tent Democratic coalition shriveled to a coastal, progressive minority, wiping out a generation of Democratic politicians and most of the party’s political diversity.

And so the party nominated perhaps the only Democrat in the country who could rival Donald Trump in unpopularity—and beat him in untrustworthiness. Mr. Sanders refused to go after Mrs. Clinton on her ethical baggage, even though it was her biggest weakness and despite how glaringly obvious was the risk that her foundation and server scandals would hobble a general-election campaign. The parties gave the country a choice between two unpopular people, and the country disliked her more. The real question is how Democrats rebuild a party whose senior leaders in the House boast an average age of 72 and which has almost no young, experienced up-and-comers.

Which brings us to Mr. Sanders, the symbol of Democrats’ other big problem. This week the senator, flanked by about one-third of Senate Democrats, released his “Medicare for All” proposal to nationalize health care. These are the ascendant voices in the party. Yet there are few of them, because their agenda is highly unpopular. CONTINUE AT SITE