cwo_ghwebb
No Use for Donk Twits
Column: Why Hillary is lessOne of the most boring weeks during my time in Washington has given the press an opportunity to indulge in a gross habit: inflating Hillary Clinton’s already considerable reputation.
The Los Angeles Times ridiculously and melodramatically says that this week Clinton “return[ed]” to the “public stage”—a location from which she has never moved an inch since her husband won his first gubernatorial campaign in Arkansas in 1978—“for the opening scene in what many expect to be a carefully plotted performance concluding with another presidential try.”
Clinton sits atop the polls. Her next book will be released in the middle of the midterm campaign. Her allies are working to elect crony Terry McAuliffe governor of Virginia in what Politico calls the “first test” of 2016. James Carville has signed on with a pro-Clinton Super PAC. The nation awaits only the formal announcement of Hillary’s candidacy.
The media cheering section is as triumphalist and boorish as ever. “Many savvy GOP insiders conceded that any Republican nominee would face an uphill battle against the former Secretary of State,” Business Insider reports. Clinton is in “a class well above the rest” of potential 2016 contenders, writes John Dickerson of Slate and CBS News. “No non-incumbent in the history of contemporary U.S. presidential politics ever looked so formidable three years before an election,” writes Al Hunt.
But Hunt is wrong. I can easily think of another “non-incumbent in the history of contemporary U.S. presidential politics” who looked “so formidable three years before an election.” Her name was Hillary Clinton. The election was in 2008. And, you might have noticed, she never became president—indeed, she never became the Democratic nominee.
I think Benghazi will bite her in the azz.