Martin Dyckman
Emily’s List emailed me to ask whether I’m ready to help elect a “pro-choice Democratic woman president.”
Yes, I replied, if it’s Elizabeth Warren you have in mind.
They didn’t answer.
At Emily’s List, as with most of the usual suspects in the Democratic coalition, no one but Hillary Clinton need bother apply. The establishment has anointed her and that’s that.
Emily’s List confirmed the obvious when it chose her to headline its 30th anniversary gala. It proceeded unfazed by the excitement over her use of a private email server rather than a dot.gov account during her tenure as secretary of state.
There are serious questions about that and a so-called liberal newspaper, The New York Times, first raised them. They won’t go away and shouldn’t. Yet the establishment doesn’t seem worried.
If Clinton’s aura of inevitability isn’t punctured fairly soon, the Democrats can look forward to one of those Titanic moments: when everyone realizes the ship is sinking and nothing can save it.
It’s a paradox. She’s at once the strongest candidate in any potential Democratic primary and arguably the most vulnerable to any Republican other than Donald Trump or Sarah Palin.
The email issue is significant because it illustrates her tendency to do things her way whether they’re proper or not and without regard to how they will look. Her disdain for making the public’s business public governed how she hatched husband Bill‘s healthcare plan in ways that doomed it for lack of broad support.
The columnist Kathleen Parker effectively debunked Clinton’s “convenience” explanation for the emails.
“Think of another word that begins with the letter ‘C’: control,” Parker wrote.
Good politicians should at least pretend they care about public opinion.
The Democratic dilemma recalls the plight of the Republicans in 1964. There was no stopping Barry Goldwater‘s march to the nomination. Thereafter, he carried only five states as President Lyndon Johnson took 61 percent of the popular vote.
Granted, LBJ was a formidable incumbent, but it’s difficult to imagine William Scranton, Nelson Rockefeller or Henry Cabot Lodge having run so poorly.
Although Clinton enjoys almost rapturous support among Democrats, her overall favorability rating is a handicap — only 44 percent, according to a recent CNN/Opinion Research Poll. Curiously the same poll reflected that 57 per cent would be pleased to have her as president, but that merely reflects the truism that all politics are relative. At the moment, voters who assume she’ll be the Democratic nominee can only guess who the alternative will be.
Clinton’s inevitability could be punctured, obviously, by just one early stumble, either in Iowa, which she seems to be avoiding, or in New Hampshire, where Eugene McCarthy‘s surprising strength drove President Johnson out of the 1968 race. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, could hurt her there.
But for the moment, she has no opponent. Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor, is interested, but would start far behind in fundraising and name recognition. If he’s going to announce, he had better not wait until she does, or she will have all the money sucked up. Unlike Sanders, O’Malley would intend to win, not just score liberal points, and he would need money.
Joe Biden, where are you?
For Clinton to win the nomination uncontested would be to win it untested, which would not be good for her or her party.
It’s not too soon for Democrats to begin thinking which Republican might be her most favorable opponent, and what they might do — as in states with crossover primaries — to help nominate that person.
That ideal opponent might well be Jeb Bush, even though he projects a more moderate image than his Republican rivals.
His nomination would take the edge off five of Clinton’s vulnerabilities:
- The control freak issue. Compromise wasn’t in Bush’s vocabulary when he governed Florida. Scrapping affirmative action without consulting anyone was one example.
- The emails. His private account was never a secret, but as with her, we have only his word that he has made public all he ones that he should.
- Her vote for his brother’s invasion of Iraq.
- Questionable friends, business associates, and foreign contributors. Both have those issues. Just the other day, The Washington Post reprised Jeb’s string-pulling with the Reagan administration, while his father was vice president, on behalf of healthcare entrepreneur Miguel Recarey Jr., who had hired him for real estate advice, to waive restrictions on Medicare enrollments in HMOs. Recarey looted his HMO and fled to Spain, which refused to extradite him. But the media will also be dredging up whatever roles Clinton may have had in husband Bill’s odious midnight pardons, including that of the fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, and in attracting foreign contributions to the Clinton Foundation.
- The dynasty issue. The son of one president and brother of another isn’t the best person to question whether an ex-president’s spouse should move into the Oval Office. He could point out, though, that his ex-presidents wouldn’t be sleeping in his White House most nights.
There surely are Democrats qualified to be president who wouldn’t come to the campaign with so much baggage to lug around. But their time is now, not later.
Martin Dyckman is a retired associate editor of the St. Petersburg Times. He lives in western North Carolina.
