I have terribly mixed feelings about seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton climbing back into the arena.
First of all, she should have been elected president of the United States in 2016. She wasn’t. She squandered every single opportunity that stood before her, starting with the quality of the fellow to whom she lost the election.
Donald J. Trump is unfit for the office he occupies. But he’s occupying it. Not Hillary.
She shouldn’t run again … ever!
“She’s always been someone who gets out there and fights for what she thinks is right,” one former Clinton campaign staffer told The Hill.
“She’s striking an appropriate balance. She still has an appreciation that she’s not the face of the Democratic Party and people don’t want her to be … but having worked for her and having seen how hard she fights, I’d be disappointed if she spent the rest of her career in the woods.”
I get that she isn’t exactly positioning herself for another presidential run. That’s fine. She shouldn’t. She need not run for the highest office ever again.
Can she a voice of some sort? Can she speak on behalf of Americans — most of whom who voted in 2016 cast their ballots for her — who want to resist whatever it is that Trump wants to do? I suppose so.
I happen to subscribe to the prevailing political theory that the Democratic Party needs to find the freshest face it can find in 2020. I’m pretty sure the Democrats will find one.
As for Hillary, well, she has had a hell of a run in a lengthy public service career. First lady of Arkansas, then of the United States; a U.S. senator from New York; a consequential stint as secretary of state; then a major-party presidential nomination.
OK, so she didn’t win the big prize. Time should enable her to look back on her life and give her a chance to relish all that she was able to accomplish.
Maybe there’s more in store for her. I just hope it doesn’t include another run for the presidency.
I agree and yet I was a big fan. I think she got a raw deal on multiple fronts. But nobody said life was fair. The media chased crazy Trump and all his craziness because we could not believe he could get away with saying that. As the saying goes there is no such thing as bad publicity. And that is the reason we have Donald Trump for president. I hope that she can provide some assistance in shaping the fresh face that runs in 2020 in a subtle way.
Clinton, one and both, are the face of a “big money” Democratic Party; a “corporate” party; the party of the 1%ers who can’t quite go Republican. They represent policies and ideas that, at one time, would have been considered moderate Republican or conservative Democrat.
It isn’t that the Clintons have moved to the right, they haven’t. Hillary’s stance on policies and issues isn’t much different from a decade or more ago. The Republicans are the ones who changed, moving very far to the right–the far-far-right–thanks to the Freedom Caucus and the Tea Party. And, Bernie Sanders has moved the Democratic Party to the left.
You’d think that would leave a large middle ground in which Hillary Clinton could find broad support but that’s not the case. She has, instead, proven divisive to moderates on both sides of the aisle as well as to those on the “far” sides. Her campaign was error prone as well in ways that proved fatal.
The Democratic Party needs something more than just a fresh face–although that is much needed. It needs candidates of integrity willing to divorce themselves from big money. Candidates willing to listen, respond, and represent all the people, not a party, an ideology, a caucus, or a corporate interest. Candidates who can and will unite rather than divide and dictate.