Hillary is immortal no more

The only things to survive the end of the world, some people say, will be the cockroaches plus Bill and Hillary Clinton, alone in the ruins when all else is gone. What they absorb, their fans claim, will just make them stronger. When down, they will always come back. But some things suggest that this time might be different, that conditions have changed, and they along with them, and this outcome is not foreordained.

The last time they took a licking and kept on ticking was 1998-2000 — when he wasn’t convicted, and she became senator — two administrations before this, a long time ago. They were then young and supple; they’re now old and furrowed; their reflexes are slower; they’ve been rich for too long. Then there were two, now there is one, and not the most talented: over the years there has been an uncoupling, and when Bill tried to help her — in 2008 for example — it did not work well. Bill was a charmer who knew how to improvise, Hillary is a scold who’s unhinged by surprises. Her tin ear, faux pas and cringe-making accents — “I ain’t nowhere tired” — are justifiably legend. You can call this strike one.

Except for the flap over Gennifer Flowers, which blew up and died early on in the contest, the scandals majeure of the Clinton regime — Travelgate, Whitewater, cattle futures, Paula Jones, and over all, Monica — all took place while the Clintons were in the White House, in total control of both state and partisan power, and thus very hard to knock out.

This time, Hillary is not in but is running for office, and as a civilian (when she ran for the Senate, she was still the first lady); a position of weakness that she is not used to, and, save for her losing race with Obama, may not have been in before. Ousting a president requires an offense of Nixonian gravity: President Clinton survived the Monica scandal (and a great many others), but even a front-running candidate is a whole other story: once the ship “Monkey Business” loomed on the horizon, Gary Hart would be gone within days. Hillary Clinton is no longer first lady, no longer even the woman publicly wronged by an unfaithful husband; but a seeker of office, and one among many, without a self-serving emotional drama to prop up her chances. You can call this strike two.

In the 90’s, the Clintons were in the White House and had all of its power behind them, but in this case the president isn’t their friend. He and the Clintons were once bitter rivals, and residues remain of this tangible bitterness: he wants a Democrat to succeed him, but who it is might not concern him, and, should she show signs of becoming a loser, he’s likely to urge her demise.

At present, Chris Stirewalt writes, he’s building a firewall between himself and her problems, with a “drip-drip-drip” of steadily negative stories, emphasizing how shocked his people are at her most recent missteps, and how they would never have committed those errors themselves. If things become worse, seeking a substitute might loom as a plausible option. As Stirewalt writes, “As we watch Obamaland start to quarantine Clinton, lest an outbreak spread to the president’s legacy project, the possibility of a real primary gets more real.”

Can this be strike three? Nothing is certain. The myth of the Clintons’ eternal success was based on a set of conditions that were not immortal. As conditions changed, so did they.

Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”

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