Front-runner status won't help Hillary - The end of the Clinton campaign

I’ve been watching Hillary Clinton’s campaign flailing in it’s death throes for about a month now, and with her lead in Iowa gone, it’s past being funny and is almost to the point of being cruel. Bill Clinton is letting his wife believe that she really can be President. I understand where he’s coming from; I was taught that the secret to a happy relationship is picking the hill you want to die on. If I had his appetites and I was married to that woman, I’d tell her whatever she wanted to hear, too. But this isn’t right. He should just tell her the truth: the country is ready for a woman to be President, it’s just not ready for her to be that woman. It’s not going to be easy and she’s not going to like hearing it, but someone has to prepare her for the post-Valentine’s Day reality of having lost the nomination. Since he’s the one who allowed her to delude herself into believing she can win, forcing us all to contemplate the horror of another Clinton presidency, it’s only natural that he be the one to bring her back to reality when it’s over.

It should make her feel better to know that she’s going to be needed in the Senate. By next January, Democrats will control both houses of Congress as well as the White House. The Republican party, having lost seats in consecutive elections, will be on the road to irrelevance if not extinction. Nothing will be able to stop the Democrats from doing whatever they want in Washington. I seriously doubt anyone would object to Hillary becoming Senate Majority Leader, making her and Nancy Pelosi the two most powerful women in the world for the foreseeable future. Think of the example it would set for women in general and, most importantly, for Chelsea. Her parents will have gone from Bubba and Hillary Clinton of Little Rock, Arkansas to President and Senator Clinton of Chappaqua, New York in one generation. That’s not just progress for women, it’s also unprecedented social climbing.

She’ll also be relieved to know that the family skeletons will stay deep in the closet where they belong. Had she won the nomination, however, their marriage would have become fair game in the general election campaign. The vast right-wing conspiracy that turned the name Clinton into a dirty word would fire back up and make the six years he spent under investigation seem like the good old days. All the work she’s done to repair the family name over the last seven years would be systematically undone by non-stop “where are they now” stories about Paula Jones, Jennifer Flowers, and Monica Lewinsky on talk radio and Fox News.

She’ll be able to take comfort from the fact that her husband ran in a time of peace and unprecedented prosperity, but she had to run in the middle of a disastrous military operation with a weak dollar and a housing crisis. Bill ran against Bob Dole, a man with a permanent grimace who people deliberately turned their gaze away from. Hillary had to run against the handsome, smiling face of the political movement of a generation, broadcast live and free of charge to 100% of the media markets in the U.S. by Ms. Oprah Winfrey. It’s almost not fair.

Bill Clinton has about a month to figure out what he’s going to say. If I was him, I’d blame her campaign advisors, who have been wrong at every turn. They tried to sell her as the inevitable nominee; apparently not realizing that her closest opponent only has to stay within shouting distance to claim victory and anything other than a landslide win for an “inevitable” candidate is a loss. They tried to portray her as having experience being President by virtue of the fact that she lived in the White House for eight years Don’t pitch the dog. Hillary was the dog. Maybe she wasn’t the dog, but she certainly wasn’t the decision maker. He knows better than anyone that she can’t handle the truth (that she’s not ever going to be President) and that’s all the more reason why he should be the one to tell her.