Diary of July 3, 2015 (The Party of the Past)

Jamesbowman.net ^ | June 3, 2015 | James Bowman

[OddLane]

Hillary Clinton came to Northern Virginia, where I live, the other day and addressed what The Washington Post described as "a crowd of several thousand Democrats" at George Mason University. "Several," as we learned a few lines further down, meant two — although the Patriot Center where she spoke can hold ten. Thousands, that is. This is not a traditional meaning of the word "several," but then the article’s author, Rachel Weiner, was obviously getting into the spirit of the occasion, which was decidedly anti-traditional.

In fact, the point of it seems to have been to give Mrs Clinton an opportunity to try out her new campaign theme. This could be summed up in her clever characterization of the Republican opposition as "the party of the past." And what red-blooded, future-hugging American would want to vote for that? It was a confirmation, really, of what we could already have divined from Mrs Clinton’s deliberate move away from the Democratic centrism of her husband to occupy as much as possible of the territory of the progressive left before Bernie Sanders or Martin O’Malley or Elizabeth Warren could take it away from her.