“You know as well as I do, that
plenty of people playing this game, they don't think that way.
They're willing to sell their souls, crawl through sewers, lie
to people, divide them, play on their worst fears for
nothing! Just for the prize [to
become a U.S. president].” – Jack Stanton (a.k.a.
“Bill Clinton”), played by John Travolta, from “Primary Colors”
(1998)
In
light of the other
option, the clear-minded are thrilled that Donald
Trump is president. Deliciously, he finds himself ensconced in
Oval Office while Hillary trolled the woods of Chappaqua, New York; a
relegated political has-been too briefly put out to pasture. (Ah, if
only she had stayed in the thicket. Without a hint of the grace
demonstrated by defeated French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen,
Mrs. Clinton has re-emerged to absurdly join the “Trump
resistance”. With the power of the office behind him, it's utter
lunacy for her to assume she'll be more successful now.) In
hindsight, she ran on sheer superficiality: name recognition, her
gender and an unstated message
of entitlement. Given her (and Obama's) non-existent
record of accomplishments, she could not run on issues or vision
as Mr. Trump successfully did. So, she took Jack Stanton's low road
described above, political
polarization:
“You
know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half
of Trump's supporters into what
I call the basket of deplorables.
Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you
name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has
lifted them up.” – Hillary Clinton at a New York City fundraiser
on September 9, 2016
Her
hollow narrative and divisive strategy were not nearly enough. The
Electoral
College results made this plain. Speaking of being grossly
generalistic, the Clintons have always
been about themselves. That's precisely the unintended message
Hillary's campaign loudly proclaimed. Didn't her ego-centered,
gender-specific
slogan “I'm with her” say everything? Contrast that with
President Trump's Reaganesque “Make America Great Again”.
Beyond
his obvious love of country—as transparent as Hillary's is
absent—one logically suspects Mr. Trump initially ran for the
presidency on a lark. He's pleasantly surprised (as his supporters)
to find himself in the job: “Hey, I'm president! Can you believe
it?” While he naturally wanted the gig, unlike Hillary, he didn't
need it. Herein is another important
difference between the two.
A new
political tell-all, “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed
Campaign” by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, is making the rounds.
Like Marley's
ghost to Richard Cohen's Scrooge, this exposé
has compelled this Washington
Post columnist to write his own shallow Hillary postmortem called
“The reason Clinton lost.” As shell-shocked
as her most ardent
supporters, this partisan begrudgingly acknowledges that it was
supposed to be “her turn”. He can articulate no other rationale
for her candidacy: “As a mental exercise, I tried to come up with a
message myself: “Hillary Clinton—because she’s not Trump” is
the best I could do. As it turned out, she could do no better.”
That's because there was nothing
else. In the final
analysis, Mrs. Clinton ran for the highest office in the land
simply because she felt she deserved it.
The
skin-deep
analysis of this award-winning investigative reporter—and four-time
Pulitzer Prize finalist for commentary—is little more than
pro-Clinton
gossamer and anti-Trump
spit. What of Cohen's sanitized description of Hillary as “a cold
and somewhat distant Midwestern archetype” and “a politician with
no gift for politics”? For real-life context, would anyone hire an
auto mechanic with no innate ability to fix cars?
Along
these lines, he insults the reputation of Walter Mondale by comparing
her to him. Yet,
Hillary has none of the former vice president's decency or warmth.
Moreover, she lacks his governmental competence (read: As Secretary
of State, Hillary's department lost
6 billion dollars) or the gravitas of an elder statesman (read:
Hillary's “Russian reset”: her humiliating plastic red button
stunt). In fact, their only relevant connection is the shared stain
of two Democrats who failed to attain the White House.
Inconvenient
truths regarding Hillary are barely mentioned by Cohen, or
ignored entirely by him. For example, he minimizes “Server-gate”—a
Nixonian scandal on steroids—as “a historically trivial matter”.
So, Mrs. Clinton's illegal use of private email servers—that
likely put American operative lives at risk by exposing national
security secrets to foreign powers and/or bad
actors—is no big deal? Beyond that, what of her ever-changing
inconsistencies that amounted to boldfaced
lies to the American people? Furthermore, what of
“Charity-gate,”
the influence-peddling of the now defunct Clinton Foundation?
Kool-Aid
drinker Cohen doesn't even bring it up.
He
bases his missive on a few personal moments spent with her, finding
Hillary “fresh, irreverent and funny”. Well, can't anyone be
snowed with a false
impression during a brief interaction? Behind the scenes, via
day-to-day experience, it's well known that potty-mouthed Hillary's
personality is cruel:
a shrew in the extreme. Hers is the Secret
Service's punishment detail: the worst assignment to be had. But
when one wears Mr. Cohen's rose colored glasses one sees what
he wants to, right?
On that basis, Columnist Cohen
contends, “But [Hillary] Clinton’s great failing, the book—not
to mention the election itself—makes clear, was her inability to
fashion a message.” What a coy, cloying criticism for such an
obviously fundamentally flawed candidate! Likewise, his juvenile
conclusion that “She lost, and a fool won” is equally petulant
and misleading. Candidate
Trump—a first-timer in the political sphere—was just “lucky”
to best 16 traditional Republican candidates, plus Hillary in the
general election? By any fair measure that's more than the
randomness that luck implies, that's genius.
Salt of the earth swing state voters in
the economically depressed Rust Belt (that she basically ignored
during her campaign) got unlikable Hillary's “coal
miner” message all right: they didn't matter to her, so she
didn't matter to them. Thus, in their wisdom, they made the better
choice: Donald
Trump. Richard Cohen should respect that despite his raw disdain
for this president. It turns out this political dinosaur doesn't get
“the message”. Neither does Hillary, an amoral person unworthy
of sycophant Cohen's empty rationalizations.
Twitter: @DavidHunterblog
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