The Hillary Machine
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hillary-machine-1428875156?mod=hp_opinion
Democrats are falling in line because they feel they have no choice.
Hillary Rodham Clinton did the formality of announcing her latest bid for the White House on Sunday, revealing nothing no one didn’t already know and facing no plausible competitors for the Democratic nomination. The question is whether this political machine candidacy will appeal to voters.
Mrs. Clinton is running less as an individual than as the figurehead of an apparatus of money and organization designed to keep power for the Democratic Party and American liberals. You might even call it a vast left-wing conspiracy, to modify the former First Lady’s famous coinage. She rose atop this machine not because of her personal qualities or her ideas but because she’s all the Democrats think they have.
What does Mrs. Clinton stand for? The main rationale for her candidacy seems to be that she would be the first woman President, and she’ll campaign on themes like mandated family leave and universal pre-K and child care. She was reluctant to emphasize her X chromosomes in the 2008 primaries, but now gender gets the showcase in the identity politics that defines modern Democrats.
Mrs. Clinton also ran in 2008 as inevitable—recall her kickoff motto of “I’m in it to win it”—and the irony this time is that this inevitability is probably true even as she pretends it isn’t.
Mrs. Clinton lost that race because her campaign was a snake pit of egos and competing power centers that allowed an untested freshman Illinois Senator to steal the nomination. She won’t make those mistakes again—and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is not a phenom in the President Obama mold. He also has the liability of his birth as a straight white male.
Thus the task of the Clinton machine will be to convince the public that this 67-year-old who came onto the national stage a quarter-century ago is the fresh voice of the future. The Hollywood and media image makers are already at work, pushing Bill (Town & Country), Hill (New York) and even Chelsea (Elle) on magazine covers.
Then there is the institutional attack machine, like David Brock’s Media Matters, which is a de facto arm of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and will trash all critics. Her fundraising engine may raise $2 billion or more from Wall Street and Silicon Valley—with the Clinton Foundation as the model, though presumably the campaign will recruit fewer Arab governments known for their splendid treatment of women and gays. And Hillary will enjoy the support of Mr. Obama, who may not like the Clintons much as individuals but needs her to win to sustain his legacy.
A large part of the machine’s job this time will be to erase the past, declaring it old news—all Whitewater under the bridge. Progressives now view the Clinton 1990s not as a belle époque but an opportunity squandered on Bill’s self-indulgence and the triangulation of the so-called New Democrats. The many scandals of the Clinton family circus, from Paula Jones to the Marc Rich pardons, will also be expunged from polite conversation.
This historical erasure will be harder given that Mrs. Clinton has so recently reminded everyone of her political method and congenital deception. A Secretary of State storing her emails on a private server and then destroying them was once unthinkable, though the Clintons operate like the Borgias. Her grim press conference to implausibly explain herself was a reminder of her disdain for public accountability.
The airbrushing will also be difficult given that she has little choice but to run as Mr. Obama’s political and policy heir. Mrs. Clinton can’t plausibly separate herself on health care, given that the proposed nationalization she wrote in 1993 was ObamaCare’s forerunner. On foreign policy, she was his chief diplomat. Her campaign chairman is John Podesta, who was Bill’s chief of staff and the architect of Mr. Obama’s executive excess.
If Mrs. Clinton does try to evoke the prosperity of the 1990s, her challenge will not merely be inducing amnesia about the slow-growth Obama years. She will be reminding people that she belongs to another era. The U.S. electorate rarely moves backwards—generationally speaking—in its Presidential choices.
Most liberals have resigned themselves to Mrs. Clinton because they believe the Electoral College demographics are in their favor and the Clinton strategy of deny, dissemble and attack will overcome any opposition. Barring a health scare or some bombshell, they’ll make due with Mrs. Clinton’s joyless, grind-it-out campaign.
But running the least competitive open-seat presidential primary since World War II is not without risks. Mrs. Clinton is disciplined and has an undeniable work ethic, but she lacks her husband’s charisma and political gifts. The Clinton machine is formidable but not invulnerable, either to Republicans or perhaps even a challenger from the left. It’s hard to be inspired by a machine.
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