Democrats' Obsession With Hillary Clinton

Democrats’ Obsession With A Hillary Clinton White House Signals Upside-Down Priorities

February 26, 2014 by Ben Bullard 

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What is with Democrats’ far-gone fascination with Hillary Clinton? Is there some underlying compulsion to realize yet another “first” superlative in the linear pageant of progressive American statecraft? In a time when Americans have already demonstrated an electoral will to put a black man in the White House, is it really so revolutionary to put a woman there simply on the merit that she’s a “she”?

Another political poll out today seems to indicate Democrats’ appetite for meaningless paper milestones remains insatiable. A full 80 percent of Democrats indicate they want Hillary to run for President in 2016, while only 13 percent do not.

The New York Times/CBS poll shows that interest in a Clinton campaign far exceeds Democrats’ interest in other early-days candidates. Only about 40 percent say they want Vice President Joe Biden in the race. Senator Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) is a distant third place at 22 percent.

Clinton’s record is shakier than Barack Obama’s was when he was a little-known Senator warming Oprah Winfrey’s guest couch. “She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train,” Camille Paglia, a true 1960s liberal and one of the Nation’s few remaining intellectual nonconformists with a public voice, wrote last summer:

And what exactly has she ever accomplished — beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband? She’s certainly busy, busy and ever on the move — with the tunnel-vision workaholism of someone trying to blot out uncomfortable private thoughts. I for one think it was a very big deal that our ambassador was murdered in Benghazi. In saying ‘I take responsibility’ for it as secretary of state, Hillary should have resigned immediately. …As far as I’m concerned, Hillary disqualified herself for the presidency in that fist-pounding moment at a congressional hearing when she said, ‘What difference does it make what we knew and when we knew it, Senator?’ Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood.

Where are the rank-and-file Democrats who would heed that message? Right now, they’re too busy confusing exceptionalism and enfranchisement with merit.