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Saturday, Aug 2, 2014 5:00 PM UTC
Is Hillary Clinton the true heir of Ronald Reagan?
Not since 1980 has a candidate seemed so unstoppable -- and Hillary resembles the Gipper in other ways too
Topics: Politics, U.S. Politics, 2016 Elections, 2016 election, 2016 campaign, Election 2016, Presidential election 2016, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Republican Party, Ronald Reagan, Politics News
No doubt it’s the height of folly to forecast the results of a presidential election that’s still more than two years away. But most observers of any political orientation, regarding the landscape right now, would conclude that it’s more likely than not that America’s first black president will be directly followed by our first female president. Are you celebrating yet?
Of course we don’t know for sure whether Hillary Clinton is running in 2016, but at this point she’s just toying with us, like a cat with a badly injured mouse. She stands in a virtually unprecedented position of dominance, relative to her own party and the electorate as a whole. While the Democratic left harbors impotent fantasies of defeating her (Bernie Sanders LOL!) and the Republican right prepares for a predictable series of apoplectic seizures about how she’s a lesbian murderess who personally shot up the Benghazi consulate, the public seems generally OK with Clinton’s impending coronation. As numerous commentators have observed, her principal opponent is probably not Jeb Bush or Rand Paul but herself, or at least the possibility that we’ll all feel sick of her before she gets elected. It’s a strange situation, and not a healthy one.
Let’s take a second to recognize that I’m a white dude delivering a dismissive take on events of undoubted historical and symbolic significance that were, or will be, immensely meaningful for many people. But after the disheartening first three-quarters of the Obama era, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that symbolic meaning is the last layer of meaning left in our quadrennial electoral circus. Maybe it’s not Hillary Clinton’s fault that her likely ascension feels like the event that will mark the final Dracula-suckage of lifeblood from American electoral politics, just as it’s not entirely Barack Obama’s fault that his “transformational presidency” blundered into a stagnant swamp infested with whining Republican mosquitoes and never got out again. They are just two people, after all! Two imperfect people with the best intentions, supposedly trying to do their best in a screwed-up situation.
Except that I don’t really buy that argument. Obama and Clinton and everybody else in the partisan duopoly are simultaneously the casualties, beneficiaries and perpetrators of a broken system, in which Democrats and Republicans draw their voters from opposing social castes (not classes) but actually represent the interests of rival cliques within a tiny moneyed elite. The onetime Seven Sisters student radical “had to” evolve into a mouthpiece for Wall Street and the entrenched foreign-policy establishment, just as the onetime Chicago community activist “had to” leave the financial sector in the hands of exactly the same criminals who wrecked it and renege on a whole range of hopey-changey campaign promises. I’m well aware of the spin their defenders will put on that stuff – politics is a dirty business and we all need to grow up and anyway SCOTUS! – and we’re not going to settle that debate today, or at any other time.
As you will no doubt recall, people got immensely excited on both sides of the heated Obama-Clinton primary battle in 2008, hurling all kinds of invective about racism and sexism at each other, predicting catastrophic defeat for the other candidate and promising to rip the fragile Democratic coalition apart. (Remember the PUMA demographic, angry Clinton supporters who threatened to bolt for the McCain-Palin ticket out of spite? Ah, memory!) Whatever that was really about – and my former Salon colleague Rebecca Traister has explored it in depth – it had very little to do with those two candidates, except in their roles as symbols or signifiers.
All that fevered discussion about who rigged the Nevada caucus and who made the most obnoxious comments on TV feels like a lifetime ago, the product of an innocent age when politics seemed charged with possibility and hope. But the thing is, it wasn’t all that long ago and we weren’t innocent. We should have known better and basically did. It’s just that presidential elections exert a seductive allure that keeps suckering us back into the tent, like a bunch of Ohio farm boys at a 19th-century carnival, hoping against hope that this time the magic will turn out to be real. It’s a lot easier to write snarky, dispassionate analysis now than it will be in a year or so, when progressives are trying to gin up excitement for a nonexistent Elizabeth Warren campaign or we all have to have a hysterical meltdown about Ted Cruz’s “surprising” poll numbers from a fondue dinner held in an Iowa cornfield.
There’s no precise historical parallel, at least in the contemporary party-politics era, for the commanding position Hillary Clinton appears to hold roughly 16 months out from the first caucuses and primaries. It’s not that there haven’t been heavy favorites or heirs apparent in previous elections – that’s a feature of the system. But it seems not just possible but probable that Clinton will face no serious or significant opposition within her own party, which as far as I can tell is a brand new situation for a non-incumbent candidate. Warren is nowhere near foolish enough to torch her political future on a futile campaign of resistance. While Joe Biden will almost certainly run if Clinton doesn’t, he’s not enough of a masochist to take her on directly and endure yet another public humiliation. If Sanders runs (and he’d have to change his political registration, for one thing) he’ll make the Dennis Kucinich campaigns of 2004 and 2008 look like devastating political whirlwinds.
If there’s a historical precedent to Hillary-zilla it is to be found in the Republican Party, where big-money donors and a Washington-based establishment have long done their best to control the presidential nomination process and quell populist uprisings. Specifically, it’s Ronald Reagan in 1980. Most Republicans assumed going into that campaign that Reagan – who had been waiting around as the conservative savior since nearly wresting the nomination from Gerald Ford in 1976 – would sweep to victory in the primaries and then drive cardigan-clad malaise-monger Jimmy Carter from the White House and restore America to its true greatness. They were ultimately correct about all that (except for the “true greatness”), but Reagan actually faced brief but spirited opposition from George H.W. Bush, who played the role of responsible centrist in that campaign and memorably denounced Reagan’s “voodoo economics.” Bush emulated the Carter-McGovern strategy of slogging through all the meaningless straw polls and small-town dinners in the fall of 1979 while Reagan stayed home in California, and after winning the Iowa caucus Bush momentarily looked like the front-runner. Reagan ultimately swamped him in the South, of course, but Bush won six primaries and more than 3 million votes, essentially forcing himself onto the ticket as the vice-presidential nominee. Who’s going to put up that level of resistance to Hillary Clinton?
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