Just how bad are the Democrats’ problems regarding the 2016 presidential nomination? They find themselves with an “inevitable” nominee whose campaign is imploding, who is facing not merely political but huge legal problems, who is the subject of investigations by federal agencies that may explode any day with unwelcome surprises, and who is dropping by the day in polls of potential national voters. All of this is happening even as her grip on the base of her party seems strong.
The time seems ripe for a primary challenge from an attractive new face from inside her own party, but that cupboard appears to be bare. Like a vast neutron bomb, two midterm elections have wiped out a generation or more of attractive young Democrats who might have appealed to a centrist electorate.
The only ones left in the party of the young and diverse are the old, white and left wingers, along with a number of certified losers such as Al Gore (lost in 2000), John Kerry (lost in 2004) and Vice President Joe Biden, who ran in the primaries in 1988 and 2008 and failed each time to exceed single digits. Perhaps Gary Hart might still be available: By now he should be too old to want to chase women, and he might have some new “new ideas.”
Who should they blame for this colossal malfeasance? Only their most recent two-term presidents, who should of course be their best friends. It was Bill Clinton who gave us “Hillary Clinton,” not as the somewhat-esteemed lawyer or bureaucrat she would have been otherwise, but as a national presence, a political figure and a public obsession and force.
It was Bill who signed on to the pact that they made that they should hold power sequentially; it was Bill who brought her into the White House as a 42-year-old lawyer from Arkansas (whose healthcare reform plan brought in a Republican Congress); it was Bill whose fling with an intern brought her the goodwill that made her a senator; and it was Bill whose clout with his party, political network and fundraising ability underpinned her first losing run for the White House, and whose mountains of cash in the Clinton Foundation is doing the same thing today.
Take Bill away (and someone, please, take him), and you might have in Hillary a bright enough lawyer-cum-activist, with no gift at all for electoral politics, which seems more and more clear by the day.
And what of President Obama, the other part of the picture — what was his role in it all? His contribution to the fix in which the Democrats find themselves can best be expressed in one sentence: He wanted to pass healthcare reform in the worst possible way, and he did.
By scheduling implementation for the year after his run for his own re-election, he saved his own bacon, but the midterms that followed the bill’s passage in 2010 and its implementation in 2013 were blast bombs that blew up his own party’s majorities, costing it first the House, then the Senate and then ending in a complete decimation at the state level that threatens its future for years.
Gone were two generations of possible presidents: In the senators and governors who might have run this time, and in the farm teams beneath that feed into these systems, from the state governments, and up from the House.
“These six years have been almost historically awful for Democrats,” says journalist Jeff Greenfield, correctly. Clinton bequeathed them a terrible candidate, and Obama cleared the field of all other potential alternatives. Between a rock and a hard place, indeed.
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.”
