A Brief Appeal to the Democratic Party
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Over the past year or so of punditry, I’ve made no secret of my belief that Hillary Clinton is the strongest candidate
the Democrats can field in 2016, and certainly the candidate
best-suited to keeping the Obama coalition more or less intact. I’ve
also made it clear that I think she’s the near-inevitable nominee: That
her strengths are so considerable and her party has become so disciplined that it’s unlikely-to-impossible to imagine a potent challenger emerging from the field of non-Clinton possibilities.
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My views on these
questions survived the first round of Clinton Foundation scandals and
the State Department email affair, and they will probably survive all
the newer Foundation revelations contained in Peter Schweizer’s looming book and my colleagues’ amplification
thereof. Unlike lesser mortals (sorry, Chris Christie), the Clinton
brand is built to withstand a nearly-endless string of
appearance-of-impropriety scandals, and it will take something more than
this to put Hillary’s political viability in real danger.
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But these views are
descriptive, analytic, coolly distant from the details. Prescriptively,
after this cascade of sheer grossness, I think it should seriously
embarrass liberals and Democrats, from the activists in Iowa all the way
up to President Obama, if their party cannot manage to field at least one semi-serious challenger (no, not Lincoln Chafee) to Hillary Clinton and her donor-greased machine.
The
Republican Party has its share of problems; indeed, it has more than
its share. But for all its dynastic and plutocratic tendencies, even the
seemingly-unbeatable dynast George W. Bush faced a sustained primary
challenge in 2000, and the only real scenario in which I can imagine a
Republican primary field being cleared this completely for a frontrunner
involves a back-from-the-dead Ronald Reagan. And you know what? Even as
a shambling revenant, Reagan would at least be able to take credit for a
pretty impressive foreign policy record vis-a-vis the Russians, as
opposed to the Hillary Clinton-led State Department’s impressive record
of signing off on the sale of American uranium production
to Russian interests … Russian interests that also just happened to
regard the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation as a wonderful
charitable concern in need of two million-odd dollars in donations.
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Was this was just a
classic case of “honest graft” rather than a more treasonous sort of
corruption? Oh, no doubt: Nobody loves America more than the Clintons,
surely, since after all America has given them so much.
.
But now one more thing
they deserve to be given is an actual primary challenger. Not because
the machine is likely to be beaten, not because the machine can’t win in
November, but because Hillary Clinton and her court embody far too many
of our elite’s besetting vices for a self-respecting political party —
let alone a party called the democrats — to nominate her without some kind of fight.
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