Politicians do the darnedest things. Every so often a top politician — and often one described by his fans as a really great intellect — will blow up his career with an unforced error so egregiously stupid that your houseplant would dismiss it as completely moronic, if only your houseplant could think.
Richard M. Nixon taped himself planning a cover-up; Gary Hart posed with a blonde in his lap; and Hillary Clinton decided to accept donations to her private foundation-cum-personal-piggy-bank while serving as the country’s first diplomat, after having set up a private email account that is not only unaccountable to outside authorities but also easy to hack.
It is not the Clintons’ first scandal, but it is by far their least timely, and their most dangerous. For the first time, they lack the protections that managed to save them before. It is exceedingly hard to remove or to sanction a president, and traditions restrict what you can do to a first lady. Whatever she did in New York, that very blue state would not turn against a Democrat who had also been a wronged woman.
But this time, Hillary Clinton is not in office, and not running for office just in New York. In the 2012 election, the vote was exceedingly close in the swing states that decided the outcome, where the voters are less likely than her fans in her base to discount these transgressions. And with a campaign in progress from now through November in the year following, don’t look for the issue to fade away soon.
In these conditions, the prudent thing would be to look for Plan B, or an alternative candidate. But if Bill Clinton gave his party a badly flawed candidate, Barack Obama has left it so badly depleted that it has hardly any options.
In 2006 and 2008, party planners planned on a 50-state strategy, picking candidates that fit with their states and/or districts so that the party would have a national presence. By 2009, it had solid majorities in Congress and in the states. But in 2010, Obama’s legacy plan of giving the voters what they had objected to began to erode these majorities, which by 2014 had become so depleted that the party, at both its state and its national levels, was at its lowest level since 1928. Gone was a generation of front-rank politicians, especially those from the swing states and red states, who had the best chance of winning a national contest.
As a result, trying to look beyond Hillary Clinton, they found mainly the old and/or lame: Jerry Brown, 76; Bernie Sanders, 75 and unelectable; Joe Biden 72 and a laughing stock; John Kerry, 74 and already a loser; and, speaking of losers; Al Gore, pushing 70, fat, divorced, and known mainly for having sold a failed TV station to a company that broadcasts Islamist propaganda for an obscenely extravagant sum.
In the younger set are two ex-governors (Deval Patrick and Martin O’Malley) whose protégées were defeated by two Republicans; Elizabeth Warren, a female George McGovern; and two female senators (Amy Klobuchar and Kirtsen Gillibrand) — unobjectionable but also undistinguished, whose resumes fail to murmur ‘commander-in-chief.’
At this point, the fictional Frank Underwood, D-S.C., might look like a bargain. With the presidents that they have had, the Democrats hardly need enemies. But where can they go to find friends?
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.”
