Tethered Swimming

“You’re gonna like me!  You’re gonna love me!  Cuz I can do most any-thing!” - Gabbo Theme Song

My suspicion is that Hillary Clinton’s chances at the Democratic nomination are, and always have been, wildly over hyped.  The press has been more or less compelled into non-stop nomination coverage for more than a year now, a media favorite had to emerge and on account of novelty and fame that favorite was Hillary Clinton.  But all that coverage doesn’t count for as much as one hayseed in Iowa or one uppity Yankee in New Hampshire.

I’ve always thought her campaign rested more on flimsy conventional media wisdom than on solid political ground.  Consider the fact that she has won precisely two elections in her history, in one of the bluest of blue states against opposition that can charitably be described as “token”.  Or that even the vaunted Clinton political machine, to which she is the heir, only ever ran one truly invincible, juggernaut style campaign, that of 1996.  Yet that swath-of-destruction style has somehow become a hallmark of Clintonian politics.  Huh?  The byline brigade assumption that props the myth of H. Clinton’s inevitable triumph is that a smart, slick, triangulated campaign has to win.  Of course, if that were true the Republicans would still be in charge of Congress.

During the dark years of true Bush dominance, from 2002-2006, Hillary Clinton acted more or less like a female, Democratic version of Bill Frist.  He was a complete political whore who wanted nothing more than to be president.  H. Clinton was pretty much the same; you could reliably expect her to have rotated to whichever direction the political winds were blowing on tax cuts, Iraq, torture, you name it.  She was an opportunist Senator for the entire duration of Bush the Younger’s Administration, and now that the winds are blowing against him she’s taking up her long lost liberal mantle.

The majority of the byline brigade sees this as a natural evolution.  But that’s because they went through the same transformation, from fawning Bush acolytes to bitter opponents.  Seeing her ever shifting positions for what they are, blatant political opportunism, hits a little too close to home methinks.  What on Earth is supposed to make Democratic primary voters, who by and large hate the Iraq War and Bush the Younger with great passion and always have, believe that she’s sincere now?

Nostalgia for the Bill Clinton years can run high, but it is not lost on people that it was the scandals and shenanigans of those years that begat the current nightmare.  Some of that wasn’t the fault of either Clinton, but some of it was.  (As if on cue, Norman Hsu was indicted yesterday.)  Both Barack Obama and John Edwards come ready made without any of the personal baggage or cloudy ideological history of H. Clinton (in Obama’s case impeccably so, Edwards is merely born again).  Either one of them is, on almost any level except that of garnering media attention, a superior candidate.

Clinton does have a lot of money and a well run organization.  But Obama can match her almost exactly in both categories and Edwards isn’t exactly a penniless neophyte.  Obama’s recent surge in the polls may be just a bump on Hillary’s road to 1600, or it may be the first cracks in a deceptively fragile structure.  My money is on the latter because as great a story as Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been thus far, nothing would make for a bigger show than seeing it implode.  Her campaign has lived on spectacle, but that means it can also die by spectacle.

The Democratic primary is, and always has been, primarily a contest of John Edwards versus Barack Obama.  If you forced me to pick I’d go with Edwards just because he’s the white guy and, let’s face it, that still matters, but one of them is going to be the Democratic nominee.