The Decline of Hillary

According to the conventional wisdom Hillary Clinton has already been elected the next president. As we know, when everyone agrees on something, the chances are very good that it will not happen. Already, Frank Bruni—no Tea Party rabble-rouser, he—has debunked the notion of President Hillary. In my post on his column last month I questioned the notion that Hillary was “inevitable.”

Now, Daniel Greenfield has some interesting observations on the inevitability of Hillary (via American Digest). He begins by pointing out that HRC, as she will soon be called, has been collecting awards, not for what she has done but for what she is:

Hillary was honored by Malaria No More for being against malaria and by the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice for supporting internet freedom. Because nothing says internet freedom like sending a man to jail for a YouTube video.

The President of Georgia honored her with the Order of the Golden Fleece. That’s considered a high honor in Georgia, but in the United States just reminds everyone of Whitewater and the Rose Law Firm.

The Queen of Spain gave Hillary Clinton a gold medal and Oceana honored her for saving the oceans. And that was a slow month.

The American Bar Association had already given Hillary its highest honor for “her immense accomplishments as a lawyer”. The National Constitution Center awarded her the Liberty Medal (an honor she shares with such Constitutional scholars as Bono, Hamid Karzai and her husband) and Elton John gave her an award for fighting AIDS declaring himself “honoured to honour her”.

Obviously, this has become a farce. In fact, it always was a farce. As Bruni and I pointed out, it’s all about the idea of Hillary, not the candidate Hillary.

You might want to interject here that America elected its current president based more on an idea than on anything resembling demonstrated competence or achievement.

Trouble is, HRC lacks BHO’s charm, charisma and slickness. In fact, when it comes to slick, BHO is a match for slick Willy himself.

Greenfield has been examining the pearls of wisdom that have been dripping from Hillary’s mouth these last months, for many of which she is being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. He is not encouraged:

Hillary traipses around the country picking up awards and delivering speeches for six figures a pop; but the only words that come out of her mouth are boring clichés.

Receiving an AIDS award from Elton John’s foundation, she announced insightfully, “We still have a long way to go.” This is what people who have never had AIDS or treated AIDS have been saying while receiving AIDS awards since the disease first became a celebrity cause.

At Oceana, Hillary declared, “More and more people appreciate what oceans mean to them.” At the University of Buffalo, she expressed the hope that we could “move away from the slash and burn politics, the name calling, the excessive partisanship” and at the Women of the World summit declared that the United States had “come so far, but there is still work to be done.”

At some point in the process, the curtain will be drawn and the world will discover that, when it comes to Hillary, there is no there there:

There will come a time when the awards will stop, when the empty quotes about how she is running because she cares about girls will run out and when she will actually have to give real answers to difficult questions. And that isn’t Hillary’s strong suit.

As a debater, Hillary is rigidly unimaginative. As a politician, she’s vacant. And her charisma doesn’t exist. The only way that she can get through her own party’s primaries and a national election is by scaring away every potential rival by being the inevitable candidate.

That is what the endless Hillary award season is really about. At galas and dinners, she dons an armor made out of awards, prizes and trophies to make it seem like her victory is inevitable.

Greenfield is correct to say that the only way Hillary can win the nomination and the presidency is to convince the world that she is “inevitable,” that destiny has preordained her candidacy.

If I had to plumb her psyche, I suspect that she believes that America owes her the presidency. After all, how many other human beings have willing subjected themselves to as much public humiliation to advance a cause.

Not really a cause, you will say, but the ambition of a man, her husband, the old horndog himself, Bill Clinton.

Hillary must feel that she deserves a reward for having undergone that much pain.

Women around the nation seem to understand that if Hillary does not occupy the oval office in her own right, she will be exposed as a cog in the Bill Clinton machine, a prop that her husband used to advance his political ambitions.

Women, especially feminists, do not care whether she was an effective senator or secretary of state. She needed to have the big jobs in order to avoid the dire truth, namely that this great feminist heroine spent most of her adult life being used and exploited to further a man’s ambition. Worse yet, the evidence suggests that she was a wife-in-name-only—a WINO.

If it’s any consolation, her husband was not using her as a sexual object.