2016 is going to be a bumpy ride for the Clinton Cabal
Posted on 04/10/2015 4:58:54 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
...It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.
Hillary Clinton, who reportedly will announce her candidacy this weekend, is such a prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic presidential nomination that she more or less cleared the field simply by behaving like someone who was going to run. That’s as much a testament to her political talent as it is to her nominal association with the boom times of the late 1990s. But it’s also the source of genuine anxiety among liberals, who worry she’ll enter the general election rusty and untested unless someone formidable dares to challenge her in the primary.
This sounds like a reasonable point, until you apply the logic to all other major political races, where favored candidates labor tirelessly to avoid primary campaigns, whenever possible. No losing Senate candidate has ever looked back and wished he’d endured a primary to loosen him up, and no winning Senate candidate ever has ever attributed his victory to the months he spent doing battle with members of his own party. Senate Republicans attribute the two recent election cycles they spent in the minority to undisciplined activists backing primary challengers, and attribute their recent victory to hobbling those activists.
In Hillary Clinton’s case, though, there’s still a good argument that the Democratic Party could use a contested primary this cycle: not to toughen up Clinton’s calluses, but to build some redundancy into the presidential campaign. It may even be the case that some of these Democrats with rattled nerves are less anxious about Clinton’s prowess against Republicans than about the fact that all of the party’s hopes now rest on her shoulders. Her campaign has become a single point of failure for Democratic politics. If she wins in 2016, she won’t ride into office with big congressional supermajorities poised to pass progressive legislation. But if she loses, it will be absolutely devastating for liberalism.
If you’re faithful to the odds, then most of this anxiety is misplaced. Clinton may have slipped in the polls by virtue of an email scandal and her return to the partisan trenches more generally. But she's still more popular and better known than all of the Republicans she might face in the general, her name evokes economic prosperity, rather than global financial calamity, the economy is growing right now, and Democrats enjoy structural advantages in presidential elections, generally.
But all candidates are fallible, and most of them are human, which means every campaign labors under the small risk of unexpected collapse. The one real advantage of a strong primary field is that it creates a hedge against just such a crisis. Right now either Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker or Jeb Bush is favored to win the Republican primary, but if both of them succumb to scandal or health scares, the GOP can shrug it off knowing that other seasoned Republicans have infrastructure in place, and are poised to swoop in if necessary.
If nobody serious challenges Hillary Clinton, nobody can be her understudy. In the near term that isn’t a problem, but if doubts about her inevitability develop late in the year or early next, the placid silence in the Democratic field will grow eerie.
The GOP’s dominance in last year’s midterms (and the dividends their victory in 2010 keeps paying) exacerbates this risk. The House of Representatives probably isn’t in play next year. The Senate barely is. Hillary Clinton must by now have reconciled herself to the possibility that her first two years, and possibly more, will be gridlocked, or defined by unsatisfying compromises with congressional Republicans. Her imprint on the Supreme Court might be dramatic, or she might end up replacing one liberal justice of particularly advanced age.
The opportunity facing Republicans is precisely the reverse. The current distribution of power on Capitol Hill is such that if a Republican wins the presidency, he will come into the White House with his party in complete control of Congress, confident he'll be able to alter the balance of power on the Court for a generation. He will have eight years worth of Democratic progress on issues like health care, immigration, and climate change to roll back. The nature of our system makes it easier for opposition candidates to ride the political pendulum back toward their ideological comfort zones than for incumbent candidates to keep it aloft.
As Ed Kilgore wrote for TPM, “It’s just a matter of time until a competition breaks out that culminates with demands and promises to repeal everything Obama ordered, including regulations needed to implement everything Congress passed since 2009.”
For better or worse, if Clinton becomes president, her greatest accomplishment might be to rescue Obama’s legacy from a bottled up campaign of retribution. That’s an awkward agenda to run on (though if the Supreme Court wipes out billions of dollars in Obamacare subsidies this summer, it will be an easy agenda to dramatize). But it’s an incredibly important objective either way. And there’s no backup plan.
Here’s a typical female supporter.
The girl who cuts my hair... has owned her own shop for over 40 years, ADORES Hillary all the while disgusted with Hillary's corruption.
This girl has seen her business drop off by MORE than 60% since 2008, abhors most Liberal abuses and policies (which she admits are breaking her), knows absolutely NOTHING about foreign policy, hates unions, etc. AND has always seen herself as a Democrat (go figure)....
However SHE would crawl over burning coals to vote for Hillary!
Not so my friend. Democrats have a structural advantage in the electoral college that is a real impediment for us. That problem does not exist in local and statewide elections. A glance at the electoral map shows this premise.
Many may well be tired of this liberal trash but the elector count will not reflect that without us taking THQ swing states. - and mounting a real effort in states along the East coast and the SW
If she didn’t vote for a Dem she wouldn’t be a good person.
Pray America is waking
Actually-You’re exactly right.
She’s wonderful and I love her like a sister.
Except she’s SO dumb about politics
CW...
I need to ask my CPA-gnomes, how to they divest themselves from the Clinton-Foundation and it's low tax rate and all the nuances of that entity of which one is (I think) their ability to draw a salary and or have expenses.
Do they have to put it on hold or put it in a "Blind-Trust"?
Have Chelsea run it, but how does she keep it at "arms legs" from her parental units?
They would never do what VP Cheney did i.e. donate a 30 million dollar nest egg of Haliburton Stock to Charity i.e dissolve this entity and give it all to Charity.
The PGA Tour? I should’ve known when the Golf Channel was bought by NBC...
The Clinton’s are absolutely convinced they can buy the nomination - can buy the presidency.
And they definitely have the money, the financial potential to pull it off.
...“First, I would have to assess what she wants me to do,” Bill Clinton said when asked what his role with the organization might be under a Hillary administration. “And second, we might have to change the [foundation] rules again. But we haven’t talked about that yet, and I don’t think we should.”
“It’s hard for any party to hang on to the White House for 12 years, and it’s a long road,” he added. “A thousand things could happen.”
The Clinton Foundation will come under intense scrutiny during Hillary’s White House bid, but it was able to get away with all of these practices while she served in Barack Obama’s cabinet. Why wouldn’t the Clintons think they might be able to get away with failing to reform the institution if the former first lady became the president?”
The woman seems to be the perfect example of “the fragmented world view”.
Modern American Society seems designed to keep people so anxious that we cant “think straight” or COHESIVELY. Obies crew have been doing a marvelous job of creating the sort of HAVOC that obscures clear thinking in most of us to some degree or anohter,
Someone please explain to me why the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund is donating to the CF.
I thought that money is supposed to be rebuilding Haiti.
You hafta wonder....what is the PGA Tour’s connection to global initiatives (as well as some of their other donors).
Sure would like to see the solicitation letters these people received from the Clintons.
Guess they all have a “Heart of Gold” and “concern” for their fellow man.....like the Clintons.
They, and the Clintons, don’t mind making a buck on it.
When Hillary left state, they found $6 billion supposedly earmarked for "contractors" went missing. Lucrative foreign contracts to companies that were Clinton Foundation donors were all administered by the State Department.....w/ Hillary at the helm.
<><> questions remain WRT how often CEOs and company reps traveled with Hillary;
<><> did the countries giving these companies lucrative contracts receive anything from Clinton?
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CONNECTING THE DOTS Then-Secy Hillary gave Haiti $3.1 billion tax dollars from the tax-subsidized govt Foundation for Earthquake Relief.
This was followed by Hillary’s brother getting a rare gold mining permit; the last permit Haiti issued was over fifty years before.
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POINTS TO PONDER:
<><> As Secretary of State, Hillary devoted much of her time in 2010 to the Haiti recovery.
<><> The Clinon Family Foundation accepted Algeria’s $500,000 donation for Haitian earthquake relief in 2010, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secy of State at the time Algeria recd millions in foreign aid..
<><> Bill Clinton got his hands on hundreds of million of dollars while Hillary controlled the State Dept checkbook..... monies that were meant for Haiti.
<><> the newlywed Clintons spent their honeymoon in Haiti.
<><> listed as a Clinton Foundation donor: Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund---organized at the behest of Obama: GHWB-WJC principles (recently disbanded).
After the earthquake in Haiti, the Clinton Foundation raised around $36 million for disaster relief, while the Obama Administration kicked in $3.6 billion.
=================================================
Protesters gathered outside the Clinton Foundation in Harlem to complain about "missing money" from the US State Dept's recovery effort for the 2010 Haitian earthquake:
They protested outside the offices of the Clinton Foundation, which helped lead the reconstruction fund. They claimed that the US State Dept's $10 billion meant to help rebuild Haiti did little to help the country after the devastating 2010 quake. And that much of the money went to non-Haitian companies.
The Haitian-American protesters also claimed that American aid to Haiti was a cover for foreign governments to funnel kickbacks of hundreds of millions of dollars to The Clinton Foundation. They believe Hillary was doing favors for the foreign governments while she was Secretary of State.
2016 is going to be a bumpy ride for the Clinton Cabal
Hillary would do different damage, but they are jealous, a Hillary administration (with Republican Congress) might actually fix some Obama damage.
I wonder how much dirt she has on Obama, though. Might be a lot. A skunk fight could prove quite amusing.
They’ve erected such a halo over themselves that it wouldn’t matter if they figuratively murdered Mother Teresa. Aaaaah those wonderful Democrats!
You mean the heart of gold they used when they burned to death Christian woman and children with tanks and gas in Waco?
No wonder why many major Democratic donors are looking at alternatives to Hillary, sometimes quite openly....
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