Rethinking Hillary 2016: Is She really the best the Democrats can do?

Now that two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures, the world’s oldest political party — the primary architect of this nation’s administrative state — has some thinking to do. The accumulating evidence that the Democratic party is an exhausted volcano includes its fixation with stale ideas, such as the supreme importance of a 23rd increase in the minimum wage. Can this party be so blinkered by the modest success of its third most recent presidency, Bill Clinton’s, that it will sleepwalk into the next election behind Hillary Clinton?

In 2016, she will have won just two elections in her 69 years, the last one ten years previously. Ronald Reagan went ten years from his second election to his presidential victory at age 69, but do Democrats want to wager their most precious possession, the presidential nomination, on the proposition that Clinton has political talents akin to Reagan’s?

In October, Clinton was campaigning, with characteristic futility, for Martha Coakley, the losing candidate for Massachusetts governor, when she said: “Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Watch her on YouTube. When saying this, she glances down, not at a text but at notes, and proceeds with the hesitancy of someone gathering her thoughts. She is not reading a speechwriter’s blunder. When she said those 13 words she actually was thinking.

You may be wondering, to use eight other Clinton words that will reverberate for a long time: “What difference at this point does it make?” This difference: Although she says her 13 words “short-handed” her thinking, what weird thinking can they be shorthand for?

The last time voters awarded a party a third consecutive presidential term was 1988, when George Herbert Walker Bush’s candidacy could be construed as promising something like a third Reagan term. A Clinton candidacy make sense if, but only if, in 24 months voters will be thinking: Let’s have a third Obama term.
As Reagan’s VP Bush couldn’t have won without offering hope of constituting Reagan’s third term. That is always true of VPs, and before Reagan you have to go all the way back to Andrew Jackson to find another historical example (man, does it make me feel old to find myself referring to Reagan as “historical”). Not counting FDR’s actual third term, of course . . .
Hillary’s case is similar because of a small episode known as “HillaryCare.” Which helped blow up the 40-year Democrat lock on the House of Representatives. SCOTUS is going to “uphold” ObamaCare again - against the wishes of Obama - by saying that the ACA means what it says. And it says that millions of Democrats and Iindependents (as well as Republicans) will be getting hosed even worse by ACA than they are now. The pressure to repeal and replace ACA - or at a minimum, to gut it - is only gonna go up. And Hillary is even less credible a vessel for the Democrats to claim to want to “fix” ACA than Romney was for the Republicans.
But then, who else do they have? Obama came out of “nowhere" to snatch the nomination from Hillary in ’08 - but he was a fresh-faced senator then. Fresh-faced Democrats are thin on the ground since the passage of ACA . . . they haven't even had a fresh-faced dogcatcher since then.

But speaking of SCOTUS and the ACA, I just had an image of what its ruling will have to say:
This court held (the infamous Roberts decision) that the ACA is a law. It didn’t say it was a wise law, but it is a law. And as such it means what it says, no matter who now wishes it said something different.
Exactly who on SCOTUS votes against that proposition? To do so would be to abandon the very idea of law itself, and thus of SCOTUS itself. Do the Obama appointees stand against that proposition? Does anyone? Their original vociferous opposition to ACA notwithstanding, do Alito, Scalia, et al? Roberts would lose all respect if he did . . .

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