Can the Democrats Get Rid of Hillary? By Daniel Greenfield
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/dgreenfield/can-the-democrats-get-rid-of-hillary/print/
The worst Clinton marriage isn’t the one between Hillary and Bill. It’s between Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. The Democrats don’t want Hillary, but they’re stuck with her anyway.
Since her last loss, the Clintons have made it clear that 2016 will be Hillary’s year. Making her the inevitable candidate, scared off other candidates and their donors. Hillary camped out on the Democratic ticket the way that Jeb tried and failed to do on the Republican ticket.
Hillary has the Democratic Party where she wants it. By scaring off every serious candidate, the party has no choice but to get behind her. And the more it gets behind her, the more it’s stuck with her.
It’s a bad marriage that the Democrats can’t seem to escape.
When Bill Clinton left, many Democrats were happy to see the last of the Clintons. The left hated his triangulation. The rest of the party was tired of the scandals and the venal couple’s vulgar greed.
Bob Herbert of the New York Times wrote [2], “The Democratic Party overlooked the ethical red flags and made a pact with Mr. Clinton that was the equivalent of a pact with the devil”, “the man is so thoroughly corrupt it’s frightening” and suggested “The Clintons may or may not be led away in handcuffs someday.” “Oh, heck, let’s just impeach him again,” Maureen Dowd [3] flippantly proposed.
Everyone from Joe Biden to Barney Frank condemned the Clinton pardons for cash. Carter called them “disgraceful”. [4] His chief of staff penned an editorial [5] describing the Clintons as “The First Grifters”.
Those condemnations have since been airbrushed out of history, but back then most of the leading figures in the Democratic Party agreed that the Clintons were thieves who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the White House again. Until Hillary did the inevitable and ran for president.
The Democrats sold out their party to the radical left to get rid of the last inevitable Hillary Clinton candidacy. Compared to their pact with the Clinton devil, the pact with the Obama devil left them overdrawn at the soul bank. Now they have no way of stopping Hillary without doing the one thing that they can’t and won’t do.
Tell the truth.
The left is desperately sending smoke signals to Elizabeth Warren urging her to run. But Warren isn’t running for the same reason that no halfway serious Democrat has entered the contest. The left could throw a lot of money at a progressive candidate, but Clinton power is huge. Obama was an unserious candidate who went in a flash from Illinois to the Senate while being groomed for the big run.
If Obama had an actual career to protect and a sense of consequences, he would never have run. It was the same combination of radicalism, inexperience and irresponsibility we’ve seen in two terms that led him to become a candidate while assembling his platform and plans out of random bits and pieces.
The irresponsibility and inability to grasp consequences was a trait that he shared with another Democrat whose improbable election took him from robbing Arkansas to robbing America.
Dems haven’t been winning the White House with establishment dynastic candidates. They’ve done their best political hackwork with wild card candidates like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, amoral men with charisma and no concern for the law. Hillary has as little concern for the law as her husband and former rival, but she’s a dynastic candidate and her charisma quotient is up there with that of Al Gore.
Bill Clinton delivered on his devil’s bargain. Hillary Clinton risks being undone by a Republican wild card who does to her candidacy now what Obama’s wild card campaign did to her candidacy back then.
That’s the nightmare scenario that keeps Democrats up at night. Not only are they stuck with Hillary, but she might just give them a President Cruz, President Paul or President Rubio.
The left doesn’t have another ClintonKiller waiting in the wings to build a network around. Hillary has co-opted a lot of Obama’s core people and the rest, like David Axelrod, seem content to snipe on MSNBC while holding out hope that Elizabeth Warren might be talked into launching a doomed run.
Barring another charismatic young leftist who can play identity politics and talk unity at the same time, the left will have to grit its teeth and get ready for Hillary.
Either that or take her down.
The media’s coverage of the Clinton scandals is a surgical operation. They want to hurt her enough to force her out of the race without damaging her badly enough to lose to a Republican. And then there’s the famous Clinton vengefulness to be considered. The same enemies list that makes Democrats hesitant about spurning her twice also makes media outlets wary about covering her scandals.
If Warren were to run, the media would double down on the scandals to force Hillary out. But until a serious candidate emerges, the media has to launch probing attacks on issues such as the email scandal and the Clinton Foundation contributions that, unlike Benghazi, don’t involve Obama, to force her out in time for Warren or someone else to step in. And considering Hillary’s intractability, that’s a long shot.
But it’s either that or learn to love Martin O’Malley’s best efforts to imitate Warren or Lincoln Chaffee’s attempts to imitate O’Malley imitating Warren, neither of whom will make progressives faint.
The Clintons have the Democratic Party by the throat. As long as they can keep a serious candidate from joining the race, then the party has no choice but to make another pact with the Clinton devil. It’s either that or throw the election, and with Republicans already in control of the House and the Senate, few Democrats appear ready to burn down the White House just to get rid of the Clintons.
The media could end this quickly by going after the Clinton scandals vigorously, instead of tentatively.
For all of Bob Herbert’s vigorous denunciations of the Democratic Party’s deal with the Clintons then, he has little to say about it today as a fellow of Demos, a lefty think tank [6] with links to Elizabeth Warren and Barack Obama, funded by Bill Gates and George Soros [6]. If the left commits to an anti-Hillary candidate, then Herbert will be swiftly activated to denounce the Clintons. Until then, he’ll keep his mouth shut.
“You can’t lead a nation if you are ashamed of the leadership of your party. The Clintons are a terminally unethical and vulgar couple, and they’ve betrayed everyone who has ever believed in them,” Herbert wrote in 2001.
I don’t doubt that he still believes that and yet he is too attached to the money machine run by the billionaires who control his party to speak out against them. It’s impossible to denounce the ethics of the Clintons when you’ve become just as bad as they ever were.
Barack Obama and Bill Clinton killed any ethics that the Democratic Party still had. All that’s left is a hollow shell run by very wealthy men of extremely dubious ethics. The current version of Marc Rich, the fugitive whose pardon led to so much outrage against the Clintons, is George Soros who now owns the Democratic Party. Eric Holder, a key figure in the scandal, became Obama’s Attorney General.
The Democrats can’t get rid of the Clintons because they have become the Clintons. The media is too corrupt to do anything but lightly push Hillary in the hopes that she will step down and clear the way for Warren. The politicians will get Ready for Hillary even as they fear the revenge of the Clintons.
And they will go on hoping that someone will find the courage to step up and save them from Hillary.
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