This Pinafore Captain Hillary (“and a right good Captain, too!”) fell not to the vast right-wing attack machine, but deploying “white” all over the place in a contest with a mixed-blood opponent and lobbing rhetorical bombs that would make the gnarliest right-winger blush: “I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran. . . . We would be able to totally obliterate them.”
She leaves a Democratic Party, built on interest groups as no other, fractured and exposed. A party that seeks an end to the secret (Australian) ballot in union elections. A party that would pack the federal courts with weepy, guilt-ridden yahoos. An abidingly redistributionist party with a nominee offering, with oh-so-much panache, a Hooverian mix of trade restrictions and tax increases — indeed tax increases that during the next five years would dwarf the nation’s thus-far-largest tax increases by a factor of 3.
The Weekly Standard’s Noemie Emery writes tellingly of Hillary becoming “the obstacle, the impediment, the residue of past scandals, the woman in the way.”
And Hillary leaves as the survivor of this battle a nominee who may have carried more state contests and more convention delegates, but likely fewer popular votes and — excepting his own Illinois — no populous state (not New York, Michigan, Florida or California) historically at the heart of Democratic presidential success. Indeed, her big victories in middle-American Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia may highlight on the marquee the problems he will have come fall. (Never in 92 years — not since 1916 — have the Democrats won the presidency without West Virginia.)
And so:
It’s finis for Captain Hillary. She has failed her Cause and in doing so failed to find her voice, either because (a) she never knew where or what it was, or because (b) she knew all along precisely where and what it was yet kept it hidden lest — strutting up there on the Pinafore’s bridge — she fail as an even more garish caricature.
O Captain, my captain! So long!