As I reflect on the “inevitable” presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton, I try to put it in historic context. She lacks the shifty eyes, darting hither and yon at her audience and the assembled press corps. Her brow betrays no beads of sweat. Nor is there any noticeable perspiration on her upper lip. She has never exactly said, “I’m not a crook.” Though she has certainly slipped up with plenty of other maladroit pronunciamentos, from her famous 1992 boast, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies,” to her more recent rant before a Congressional committee investigating Benghazi: “What difference at this point does it make?” Let me hasten to answer that it does indeed make a difference how violence originates in a faraway land where four Americans were about to be murdered.

Yet, curiously enough, by now she is the Democrats’ closest approximation to President Richard Nixon. In fact, she and her husband probably trail behind them more baggage than even Nixon did. He resigned before being impeached. The Clintons brazened it through before Bill Clinton was finally impeached. He was not convicted, however, and — almost miraculously, if you can remember what even Democrats were saying about them — the Clintons continued their amazing political lives. Though they acquired still more baggage.