So much for handing the nomination to Hillary Clinton.
The candidate, who seems utterly incapable of capitalizing on a sure thing, now finds herself with a rebellion among grass-roots progressives, while coping with the fallout from utterly avoidable scandals with her email, and the appearance of “pay-to-play” between the Clinton family charity and her political career.
Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born, socialist senator from Vermont, two weeks away from his 74th birthday – a cocktail party joke when he declared he was running – has made it a pick ‘em race in Iowa and New Hampshire based on fairly spontaneous and heartfelt support among the left. Worse, in the most recent Quinnipiac poll, the term most used by voters to describe Mrs. Clinton was “liar.”
These are not the conditions of a successful presidential run.
But despite this precarious situation, is Hillary actually done?
No.
First, and not to put too fine a point on it, Hillary is a Clinton. They don’t win clean, they win by dogged persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. They do what it takes. Winning ugly is still winning.
Second, Mrs. Clinton has waited a lifetime for this moment. Her utter incompetence in handling a nomination that was boxed and packaged for her two years ago does not dim the simmering entitlement to the presidency.
She has existed in the shadow of others for most of her adulthood. Two men have humiliated her in public life – Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. In both cases, she received a consolation prize – the Senate seat from NY and leadership of the State Department. But that is not enough. History does not simply demand a woman for the presidency – it demands Hillary – a proxy, whose election would be a soothing balm for every American woman with a sense of grievance at societal misogyny and sexism.
This isn’t just about winning. There are scores to settle.
So, no, Mrs. Clinton is not going to go quietly into the night.
But dogged determinism doesn’t change the facts on the ground. The grass-roots don’t believe her, and the voting public doesn’t trust her. More amazingly, this has almost nothing to do with anyone but Hillary herself.
Mrs. Clinton’s thoroughly malleable political views are a function of convenience, not principle. You need only follow the “evolution” of those views since her Senate run in 1999 to see the true scale of change.
And the email controversy, with its elements of intentional deceit, national security recklessness, personal risk-aversion, legal intemperance and public denial, is by far the best indicator of Mrs. Clinton’s judgement that the public has available to evaluate the true character of the candidate.
It should provide dramatic pause.
But 2016 is not just about Mrs. Clinton, it is about the future of Obamaism.
President Obama’s legacy will be dismantled, piece by piece, if a Republican wins next year. Perhaps more than any post-WWII president, Obama needs the Democratic nominee to hold the White House in 2016, if for no other reason than to allow time for his programs to weave so tightly into the fabric of America that no future GOP president can unwind them.
That said, you can almost feel a sense of astonished exasperation out of the White House.
Having given Hillary the presidential checkbox for foreign policy, and largely staying on the sidelines as the Clinton machine coughed and wheezed back to life to support another presidential run, Mrs. Clinton has effectively screwed up a free lunch, all on her own.
What was originally the price of politics for Obama – tacitly supporting Clinton as the vehicle to entrench his programs – has now become the more existential question – whether Clinton has what it takes to win to protect his accomplishments.
Back in Hillaryland, the semi-permeable alternate reality where Clinton’s campaign performance still draws rave reviews, it is only now becoming apparent that the email controversy has legs. But despair is banished by the Hillary high command by simply looking at the political calendar. It is very late in the game to try to organize a national campaign from scratch. Had the email story broke in early 2014, it might be a different story today, but Clinton’s bad news has dripped out only after she had laid the necessary groundwork for the coronation, as a junior varsity cast of contenders chose to challenge her.
As if to demonstrate the long odds of winning the nomination against Mrs. Clinton at this point, even as clouds hang low around her campaign, 20 percent of the delegates required to be the Democratic nominee (Super Delegates) pledged to Hillary at the DNC meeting over the weekend. Moreover, Mrs. Clinton knows that as disenchanted as the grass roots are, they will ultimately back her to prevent a Republican presidency.
In Hillaryland, August 2016 will be a much brighter month than August 2015.
No, the only development that can derail Mrs. Clinton from the nomination is not an existing contender (Sanders won’t be competitive after New Hampshire, if he makes it that far), or even a new entrant into the race, but President Obama’s Justice Department.
Right now, the Hillary campaign can continue its blizzard of denials and obstrufications regarding the email controversy. The news media, protective of Hillary to begin with, will be only too happy to move on to other stories. The leaves are starting to turn, and Iowa is coming into view.
However, if Justice Department begins handing out indictments over the serial abuse of classified information by Mrs. Clinton’s aides, or Hillary herself, the party is over. The Democrats cannot put forward a candidate for the presidency who is under indictment, or whose aides have been indicted.
But of course President Obama would never let this happen, right? Indicting your party’s front runner for the nomination five months before the primary season has never been done. But at the same time, there has never been a front runner quite like Mrs. Clinton.
By way of context, no Administration has been more determined to prosecute leaks of national security information than that of President Obama. Forget the reporters who have landed in jail for publishing classified information. POTUS was even willing to take down his own CIA chief – a genuine American war hero, David Petraeus – for a security infraction that pales in comparison to Mrs. Clinton’s wonton recklessness over four years.
The security precedent is there. It is only a matter of whether President Obama will pull the trigger. That will depend entirely on whether POTUS believes that: 1) Mrs. Clinton can win, 2) that she will be faithful to his program, and, 3) there is no better alternative that would be more amenable to Obama’s post-presidential influence.
If POTUS pulls the trigger, the Democrats would have little choice but to invoke something that looks like the “Torricelli Precedent.”
Robert Torricelli was a senator from New Jersey. In 2002, while running for re-election against an unknown GOP opponent, allegations were made that Torricelli had accepted illegal campaign contributions from a businessman tied to North Korea, among other unsavory people and organizations. Torricelli maintained his innocence and kept issuing denials, as his poll numbers tanked.
On September 30th, 32 days before the election and long after the legal period when changes could be made to nominees on the ballot, and under enormous pressure from national and state-level Democrats who wanted to protect the Democrats’ one-seat majority in the U.S. Senate, Torricelli ended his campaign. The NJ Supreme Court allowed Democratic Party elders to place well-known, former Senator Frank Lautenberg on the ballot in Torricelli’s stead. Through their efforts, the Democrats managed to save the seat, if not their majority in the Senate, through this chicanery.
The same model could apply if Justice Department hands down indictments in the email scandal.
Obama could legitimately point to Petraeus example to show that his hands were tied on legal prosecution of national security-related issues. Once it became clear that the indictments could not be stopped or sped up and resolved, and that this would be a death blow to the Clinton campaign, it would be left to the Clintons and Obama to decide about a graceful exit, and more importantly, who would inherit the mantle.
To be smooth and politically decisive in a way that would unite the party, Hillary’s exit from the campaign would have to come with an endorsement that would represent de facto instructions to her supporters to join the newly anointed candidate. That would immediately free up the money and infrastructure that would be crucial to the nomination and the general election battle.
But who?
That would depend on whether Hillary was negotiating to place a Clinton insider on the ticket – to maintain influence – or, if the charges looked more daunting, to ensure a presidential pardon for any alleged wrong-doing from POTUS as the legal process plays out. That, in turn, depends on what Obama’s Justice Department finds on the servers, backed up by the Intelligence community.
Millions of votes will be cast in the Democratic primary in 2016.
Today, only one vote matters in the lead up to Iowa, and that belongs to President Obama. Mrs. Clinton’s future and the destiny of the Democratic Party are in his hands.