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.
As she was before ... but then came Barack.
And all his damage needs to be protected.
Hillary’s main problem is she is running the unpopular Obama policies for a third term.
That’s a tough act to follow since after eight years, fatigue with the party in power sets in.
Hillary will have to separate herself from Obama and define her own candidacy to stand a chance.
HILLARY’S RUNNING MATES-—a campaign focused on who gets payback w/ our tax dollars.
The Clinton Foundation Contributors:
Donations greater than $25,000
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation *
Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (Canada) *
Fred Eychaner *
Frank Giustra, The Radcliffe Foundation
The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation
UNITAID
* Indicates a contribution was made by this donor in 2013.
Donations of $10,000,001 to $25,000,000
Donor name
AUSAID
Stephen L. Bing
COPRESIDA
Tom Golisano *
Government of Norway
The Hunter Foundation *
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Nationale Postcode Loterij *
Cheryl and Haim Saban & The Saban Family Foundation
The ELMA Foundation
Theodore W. Waitt
* Indicates a contribution was made by this donor in 2013.
Donations of $5,000,001 to $10,000,000
S. Daniel Abraham
Sheikh Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi
C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, Inc. *
Commonwealth of Australia, DIICC *
Elton John AIDS Foundation
Government of the Netherlands *
Irish Aid
John D. Mackay *
The Victor Pinchuk Foundation *
Michael Schumacher
State of Kuwait
The Coca-Cola Company
The Wasserman Foundation *
* Indicates a contribution was made by this donor in 2013.
Donations of $1,000,001. to $5,000,000
100 Women in Hedgefunds
Absolute Return for Kids (ARK)
Jay Alix
Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa *
Alltel Corporation
Nasser Al-Rashid
Anheuser-Busch Foundation
Smith and Elizabeth Bagley *
Mary Bing and Doug Ellis
Richard Blum and Blum Family Foundation *
The Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation
Susie Tompkins Buell Fund of the Marin Community Foundation *
The Sherwood Foundation *
Richard and Jackie Caring *
Gilbert R. Chagoury
Cisco *
Citi Foundation
Clinton Family Foundation and William J. Clinton *
Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund *
Victor P. Dahdaleh & The Victor Phillip Dahdaleh Charitable Foundation
Robert Disbrow
Dubai Foundation
Duke Energy Corporation *
Entergy *
Issam M. Fares & The Wedge Foundation
Wallace W. Fowler
Friends of Saudi Arabia
Fundacion Telmex *
Mala Gaonkar Haarman
The James R. Greenbaum, Jr. Family Foundation
ICAP Services North America *
J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation *
Sanela D. Jenkins
Robert L. Johnson *
Walid Juffali
Dave Katragadda
Kessler Family Foundation
Michael and Jena King *
Lukas Lundin
MAC AIDS Fund
Lakshmi N. Mittal
James R. Murdoch
Norad (Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation) *
OAS S.A. *
Denis J. O’Brien *
OCP Corporation *
Open Society Institute
PGA Tour, Inc. *
Presidential Inaugural Committee
Princess Diana Memorial Fund
Procter & Gamble *
Stewart Rahr
Paul D. Reynolds
Robertson Foundation
Salida Capital Foundation
Joachim Schoss
Bernard L. Schwartz *
Arnold H. Simon
Bren Simon *
Amar Singh
Carlos Slim Helú & Fundación Carlos Slim *
Michael Smurfit
Steven Spielberg *
State of Qatar
Sterling Stamos Capital Management, LP
The Streisand Foundation *
Suzlon Energy Ltd.
Swedish Postcode Foundation *
Swiss Reinsurance Company *
Nima Taghavi *
The Annenberg Foundation
The Boeing Company *
The ELMA Philanthropies Services (U.S.) Inc.
The Government of Brunei Darussalam
The Howard Gilman Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation *
The Roy and Christine Sturgis Charitable & Educational Trust
The Sidney E. Frank Foundation
The Sultanate of Oman
The Swedish Postcode Lottery
The Walmart Foundation
The Zayed Family
Torres-Picón Foundation *
T.G. Holdings
U.S. Green Building Council *
UK Department for International Development (DFID)
Verein Aids Life
The Walton Family Foundation
Gerardo Werthein
Seven more category of donors [drop down lists for each donor group] at link
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/contributors
All Hillary has got going for her is her gender and making history as the first woman President.
He figures she has to run---b/c the Clintons have made hundreds of promises to get donations to the multi-billion dollar Clinton Foundation.
Thousands of corporate and foreign govts are waiting for payback w/ usurious interest.......as the conniving Clintons plot to hijack yet another govt agency----the US Treasury.
Insincerity is her middle name.
YouTube: Benghazi Attack Victims Honored by Hillary Clinton [9/14/2012 The full remarks of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at the repatriation of the remains of the four men killed when the U.S. Consulate in Libya came under attack.]
Of course. Also, I am sure that LIKE US, they don't know EITHER, how much more BS will come out of the perpetually and predictably damaging exposes about her incompetence and corruption ... and which she can't seem to side step.
There is NO guarantee that either she or her
‘husband’ will step into the full swing of campaigning with squeaky clean personas.... NONE.
No one knows HOW inured Americans are to proved and unabashed corruption in politicians, and THAT'S the gamble the DNC has to live with in backing Evita.
It's anyone’s guess because BY NOW, so much unpunished corruption and criminal incompetence has been demonstrated across the board by ALL politicians and officials that, it's entirely possible Americans are de sensitized to the extremes of Clinton malfeasance and venality!
Interesting.
I don’t think Bill wants her to win.
He’s happy with his nest egg and she’ll just rock the boat.
"Democratic progress"?? It is to laugh.
BTW, what "progress" was made on "climate change"? (Except for the fact that the greenie nitwits have lost every battle on it.)
And her politics. And her legacy as Co-President. And she’s a grandmother. And the media. And the college campuses.
See what we’re up against?
In the words of Chuck Schumer: “We’re united. You’re not.”
No backup plan? The author is nuts. There’s, uh, lessee Uncle Joe and there’s, uh...um, Martin Joseph O’Malley, Governor of Maryland, from 2007 to 2015. Besides, there’s also...uh
Yes, Dems have a full strength bench and there’s more coming out of state houses country-wide every day.
Thank God we have our RINOs who will fight back all efforts to repeal our tyrant-driven communism of these eight years.
We are in luck, then. The nation would never fall for something as trivial and meaningless as gender or skin tint.
As I recall Mrs. Bill was a “prohibitive favorite” to win in 2008- until she didn’t. The Party had a different idea.
“Progress” on health care was the most corrupt passing of national legislation ever without ANY opposition support...and the nation hates it as much as ever five years in. “Progress” on immigration is executive orders or letters that open our borders to a Biblical flood of uneducated, disease-ridden foreign invaders and telling our immigration authorities to illegally stop law enforcement.
Any more such progress is death to freedom and the rule of law.
As you say, it is to laugh.
Lemmeeee see....what did Hillary do w/ ntl security secrets? I'll just take a wild guess:
"Smile everybody. Another $100 million came in today."
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