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2020 Hindsight
In the New York Post, Michael Goodwin says Hillary Clinton is onto something.
I believe he’s onto something. It started in 1998. It was always hard for me to believe Hillary was actually planning to run for President. Yet it always seemed vaguely plausible. That is, until it was obvious.
Why did First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton want to become a Senator from New York? The obvious reason would be to establish a track record to run for higher office, but Hillary the future Presidential candidate, seemed far-fetched. She denied it, dismissed it and laughed about it. She was focused on helping downtrodden upstate New Yorkers get jobs and feed their families. That’s all. It didn’t ring true, but could she really become President? She ran for re-election in 2006 winning her seat easily and in that contest remained taciturn about a Presidential run in 2008.
But of course she ran, and lost to Obama and many of us thought that it was probably over for her. 2016 looked like a futuristic world and surely Democrats would have moved on by then.
However, it began to look again more likely after she left her duties to the Empire Staters to enhance her resume as Secretary of State. As the years passed it looked pretty clear she was preparing a 2016 run. That time, we knew.
But following her ignominious and wholly unexpected defeat – which seems like yesterday – many of us thought her career was over for sure this time. She was falling down, seizing up, blaming, shaming and defaming everywhere. She was hated by many Democrats for running a bad campaign, for her treatment of Bernie Sanders in the primaries, and for losing to the clown Trump.
Like the modern audience watching a horror film, we know that the motionless psychopath submerged in the bathtub will bolt upright any second now to continue her blood-thirsty rampage. The timing of these scenes have shortened considerably over the years, the audience can’t be given too much time to catch the setup. Long enough to have them believe it’s finally over, but not too long. “Of course!” We say to ourselves, “and there’s 20 minutes left in playing time!” But we love to be fooled. That’s why they call it the willing suspension of disbelief.
There are several other reasons why it makes sense for Hillary to undertake another run: the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative both rely on the idea that a Clinton might just someday become President in order to leverage funding and influence. (It’s not going to be Chealsea anytime soon…) Without that prospect, why should anyone donate? There are all kinds of worthy charities out there.
She’s feeling the loss of transactional power already. Impending candidacy is necessary to use as an intimidation mechanism to discourage attacks from disillusioned allies.
And who in the Democratic Party has the inside track for 2020 that would be formidable? Joe Biden? A few considerably less experienced women? Who in her center-left lane can mount a serious challenge?
And she wants it. She wants it badly.
So the horror film, coming soon to an election near you, will be another sequel, and like all sequels, coming with a new angle. This time the psychopath goes after her own family in a vindictive narcissistic rage.
Will there be another sequel in the franchise? (working title – Hillary III: Vengeance is Mine)
How will this play out for the Democrat party?
Published in General, Politics
Calling the evidence that the article linked in the OP thin would be an abuse of language. It’s practically nothing.
CNN has been known to run with less.
Not to mention pundits in all political camps. Or other Ricochetti. I’ve never done such a thing, of course.
OK, let’s do NATO, but not here. Franco started a post on the members’ feed with a video clip of the recent breakfast meeting at which President Trump took on NATO SecGen Stoltenberg.
I don’t pay much attention to CNN.
This is all speculation. Where did you get the impression these are facts? We certainly can’t believe Hillary herself so we have to wonder based on past performance and motivations.
So what you’re saying is Hillary won’t run?
Wanna bet?
I don’t remember; That was the long time ago time, which was a while ago.
Meh, I couldn’t care less. If she runs she’ll just harm the Democrats and lose again either in the primaries or the general. If she doesn’t Democrats continue their lurch to the left. I literally don’t care what they do. It would be interesting if there was a popular moderate blue collar Dem out there but there isn’t. Maybe Kamala Harris will run and rebuild the Obama Identity Politics Coalition. Maybe they’ll lurch to full-on socialist under Bernie. Those seem like interesting questions to me. Hillary is old and uninteresting news. The Clintons are the herpes of American politics – they’re always there and occasionally they flare up and ruin a nice time, but I don’t spend much time thinking about them because they don’t affect my life in any way.
Your essay seems to leave out the part where the valiant Hillary Clinton is saving the USA from “Hitler.”
Which although a rather tired canard, is all the Left has at this point. And a tired canard which former acquaintances on Facebook still like to use to “remind” me.
Was just asked on Sunday how I, as a former Democrat, can have gone so far to the Right that I now support Hitler?
I am waiting for another 48 hours or so to reply to that duo of accusers. After all, there could be a possibility that Trump is Hitler. (The Money Channel had a commentator who stated he was “literally Hitler.”) Being pragmatic, why waste my time replying to people who will soon be in some modern day Dachau?
But I am betting my accusers will still merrily be on FB, unperturbed by Gestapo or agents of the Long Knives. (Which is as it should be, although Goddess knows I wish they would grow up already.)
As people were pointing out the day after the election, the calendar has conspired with Hillary to give her a great campaign slogan – Hindsight is 2020, Elect Hillary. Bernie could probably use the hindsight slogan and the Democrat candidate could probably stretch it to mean elect a Democrat, remove Trump.
I think Clinton wants to run again and will if she can. Further, I think that they still have a machine which will try to help. I don’t think the system has turned on them.
I think this is about where I fall. They might clean up though. Have to see. Does not look like anything but leftist lurch right now.
Can anyone imagine if John McCain had come back to run in 2012? Or Mitt in 2016? ( well, we had Jeb which had a similar effect).
Or Cleveland came back in 1892? :) He had won it once though.
I can sometimes be an incurious git. All this time I never knew the details behind the split in Cleveland’s terms and hadn’t looked into it. I went to Wikipedia to get the right date for my quip. I learned that he won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college in his reelection bid. The list of Presidents who lost the popular vote, but won the presidency never clicked with me that one of them was in between Cleveland’s terms.
I need to study the article some more when I get more time. The 1892 electoral map has a lot of circles within the states showing that the elector votes were split. I thought Maine and Nebraska allowing electoral votes to be split was something new, but evidently not.
Seems a little vague for a campaign slogan. It would have to be explained. I was thinking that Trump could retort with something about being the forward-looking candidate, but it all gets too complicated.
People say that Trump is in Putin’s pocket but it looks more like long-term ferret-legging to me.
That is both hilarious and disturbing.
Usenet. And better Fidonet servers.
Why pay attention to any news source where a narrative agenda comes first? My favorite was the impeach Trump because he used the wrong fork at dinner campaign. Fox included.
Well, some narrative agenda is bound to come first anywhere. It’s human nature for groups of people to usually see the world in terms of the stories they’ve socially agreed to see, even if they don’t do it consciously. The question is, where do you go for the relatively more trustworthy narrative agenda?
And the other question; how much effort should you put into telling the difference between a more trustworthy narrative agenda and the dulcet tones of confirmation bias news.