This article is the first in a four-part series.
As Senator Clinton herself has often noted, she’s one of the most scrutinized and dissected figures in modern politics. Now, I haven’t the impartiality to evaluate her without prejudice, the scholarship to provide genuinely original historical insight, or the terseness to do so in only a few hundred words, so, to sidestep her sweeping biography entirely, I shall say only that of all the candidates, her historical legacy has already been most firmly secured. She’s famous, clever, wickedly ambitious, and on top of all that, her campaign seems to be in the final throes of a noisy demise. How could one possibly lead off a discussion of the election with anyone else?
She has carved out a niche for herself as the “experience” candidate, rhetoric that has been related as similar to Yoko Ono claiming that she knows what it’s like to be a Beatle. None of the major candidates, of course, have ever had any significant executive experience, a fact which itself isn’t exactly Q.E.D. – there are more than a few examples of individuals who without any executive experience whatsoever have presided admirably at 1600 Pennsylvania. But cheekiness aside, she does have a point; one principle with which everyone must surely be in accord is that the presidency is very much a job apart from that of a senator. Eight years of immersion in the environment, even if only by proxy, does certainly suggest that her baptism won’t be quite as fiery. (A bitter partisan might add, “Hillary Clinton does know where the bodies are buried,” but I wouldn’t.)
Clinton also drags alongside her the heaviest set of burdens. She is widely perceived as a conniving, carpet-bagging lesbian with no sense of humor and a titanic sense of entitlement – an eclectic set of assertions which are part truth, part exaggeration, and part fiction entirely. (And in addition, perhaps betray more about the perceiver than the Senator herself.) The most grievous insult is that she is “unlikable,” an insipid ad hominem whose hurtfulness is matched only by its vagueness, and the most dim-witted insult is that she is “unelectable,” a circular contention which has inexplicably managed to become a piece of its own evidence. And this is not even to mention the impact of Hillary’s most fervent and visible surrogate, mixed as it might have been.
But most importantly, will she win?
It doesn’t seem likely. The circumstances surrounding the Democratic nomination are grim: Obama has an almost insurmountable lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and although Clinton maintains a lead of her own in unpledged delegates, these so-called “superdelegates” are party elites who are unlikely to directly contravene the wishes of their own constituents. Meanwhile, Florida and Michigan, due to deliberate procedural violations, had their pledged delegates removed from the contest months ago, and their reinstatement would have restored hundreds of additional delegates and been a boon for her, but over the last week, both nullifications were reaffirmed. This leaves less than six hundred pledged delegates remaining until the convention, most of them split relatively evenly between the two candidates. Even under the most absurdly generous scenario, she is unlikely to ever regain the lead.
The most suitable description for the situation comes from the nomenclature of the sports world: to secure the nomination, she would have to “back in” due to a critical Obama misstep, and one on the order of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, not Jeremiah Wright. But as unlikely as a victory might be, we should have learned, à la Paul Tsongas, that one mustn’t ever make the mistake of discounting the Clintons.
