There is a disturbing question I would like to ask about Hillary Clinton, and it's disturbing mainly because no one who has bandied her name about as a presidential candidate since she was First Lady over a dozen years ago ever seems to have spent a single moment thinking about it: Where in the entirety of Hillary Clinton's career is the evidence of talents, skills, and a personality suited to the Presidency of the United States, and suitably extraordinary to fill such a tremendous role? Where exactly is the motivation for trying to rationalize this particular person as not only suitable for the Presidency, but the best choice among many possibilities?
As far as I can tell, there is none: Whenever Hillary Clinton has been in a politically convenient position to be chosen for a job, people have rationalized it as a sufficient qualification needing no deeper or broader substance. This is the kind of unreasoning, unexamined, inertia-driven insider politics that drove our Party to mediocrity, impotence, and ultimately Stockholm Syndrome collaborationism in the 1990s and 2000s, and apparently we haven't yet fully overcome this disastrous brand of groupthink.
The objective reality of Hillary Clinton's career and personality is far, far below any sane standard of Presidential leadership: Every step of the way has been characterized by the Washington version of "social promotion," beginning as First Lady - a purely ceremonial role with no official responsibilities, which became hers simply because she had married a man decades earlier who would later become President - then transitioning, by pure nepotism, into a Senate career characterized by the most grotesque cynicism and selfish game-playing in America's darkest hours of need; and culminating in a surreal 2008 presidential candidacy where outright personal entitlement to the presidency was an official campaign theme.
At no point in this blindly-pursued career do we get a sense of untapped talent being revealed or even hinted at, unknown courage rising to the surface, or the kind of inspirational vision that can galvanize and lead a nation. Instead, we just see one title and office cavalierly transitioning into the next through insider Party politics, working the system in order to become anointed, and people had just numbly gone along with it as if it were perfectly natural until Barack Obama arrived in 2008 and shattered the pattern. We were told that her presidential candidacy - and indeed, her presidency - was "inevitable," that it was "her time," and all sorts of disquietingly irrational appeals to machine-politic fatalism.
She had worked herself into the cog in the machine that, upon one more turn, would deposit her into the presidential nomination, and somehow a lot of people were just fine with that or even comforted by it. Many people were actually offended by Barack Obama's candidacy, as if it were some sort of violation to spoil Hillary's party - it "wasn't his time," he had not worked his way through the machine, and he had the unmitigated gall to make actual arguments and prove himself to be brilliantly talented rather than appealing to the blind workings of process for his justification. Then, having won both the nomination and the presidency, Obama gave her the first federal leadership position she was actually qualified for (though hardly deserving of) - Secretary of State - although it's highly doubtful she would ever have risen so high without her previous two dubiously-acquired roles (Senator and presidential candidate) or the overwhelming influence of her husband that had made them both possible.
As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton has shown herself to be a capable diplomat and administrator working under the aegis of someone else's Presidency, and any more extensive judgment of her tenure would require much greater knowledge of the State Department than I have. This brings us up to date as far as her career goes, so I ask again: Where in any of that does the idea that she should be President of the United States arise? She has proven that she can work competently for the federal government in a bureaucratic and diplomatic leadership capacity - which can also be equally said of hundreds of other people whose names you have never and will never hear in association with campaigns for elective office.
So once again we find ourselves falling back on the simple fact that her name is Clinton, and she was a presidential candidate in 2008. And why was she a presidential candidate in 2008? Because her name was Clinton and she was a Senator. And why was she a Senator? Because her name was Clinton, and she was married to a President. A completely irrelevant triviality was used to leverage one status upgrade after another without having to remotely justify it at any point in the process, and in fact at several points in the process (e.g., voting for the Iraq War) utterly disgracing herself on behalf of some depraved realpolitik calculation of political viability that didn't even turn out to be true. She apparently believed that no Democrat who voted against the Iraq War would be a viable presidential candidate, and so - in an act of depraved cowardice and selfish nihilism worthy of the Vichy French - voted to enable the most heinous act of treason since the formation of the Confederacy.
We in the informed public knew what was going on, and plenty of her most distinguished and respected colleagues - e.g., Ted Kennedy - knew what was happening as well and spoke eloquently on the Senate floor about it, but Senator Hillary Clinton was living in a completely different world: The alternate world created and defined by right-wing pundits, and reinforced by the insider Party orthodoxy they had helped institute in Democratic leadership via organizations like the DLC. In Hillary Clinton's world, America was a conservative country who adored George W. Bush, was chomping at the bit for the murderous invasion of Iraq, and would never vote for a Presidential candidate who had stood up at this critical moment in our nation's history and simply spoke the plain truth when it was most needed.
In both word and deed, she walked on eggshells for years to avoid angering the Republicans who waged war on American laws and ideals no matter how vile, murderous, and treasonous their actions, and at many times actively collaborated with these actions in order to curry favor with Republican committee chairmen - kowtowing that went largely unrewarded. At times she publicly rationalized torture, and limited her criticisms of the Bush regime to mild matters of competence and emphasis, as if the differences between Bush's David Lynchified pervert-dictatorship and the government she would prefer to run were merely matters of polite disagreement rather than fundamental moral, legal, and civilizational incompatibility.
Then around about 2006 and the Democratic resurgence, Hillary Clinton suddenly started talking like a Democrat again - first in measured snippets rationed out like some sort of commodity, and then in more regular doses as the presidential primaries approached. But even then, there was no apology for the Iraq War vote, and no acknowledgement that it was a mistake - as she tells it, the authorization simply passed the buck to Bush, and it was he who made the fateful decision, whereas Hillary and the others who voted to give him that power were blameless. So, to be clear, it is not merely that she was never tested: She was in fact clearly tested, under conditions of decision far less demanding than a President would face, and failed her country miserably for years on end in order to serve her own interests. But the cherry on the sundae is that she failed even in serving herself, because her political calculations were based on nothing but the smoke-and-mirrors of Republican pundit propaganda, so once she finally did run for president, her vote for the Iraq War was decisive in denying her the nomination.
Frankly, with this Senate record on foreign policy, her appointment to Secretary of State was in retrospect an act of pragmatism that could not possibly have been justified on her personal merits, and may itself be numbered among the offices she has held purely by virtue of the clout she holds among the Party hierarchy. But, not having a detailed knowledge of her actions as Secretary of State, I can at least say that nothing she did in this capacity that I'm aware of was outrageous. Ringing endorsement, right? And yet here we are again, with no less than Markos putting up a Front Page piece on what a stirling candidate Hillary would be in 2016.
The thing is, he and so many others simply forgot to ask the most basic question: Why in the hell would you want Hillary Clinton to be President in the first place? What qualities has she ever exhibited that both address the qualities of a President, and do so at such extraordinary levels as to justify being seriously considered as both a candidate and an actual national leader? All I can see is that she's in a position to be nominated, not that there is any remotely sane reason to nominate her, and to me this reeks of backsliding into the mediocre, valueless, nihilistic DLC-style Party that made participation in politics so intolerable for so many people, for so many years.
We are shown poll numbers that have her higher than potential Republican contenders, but that's obviously apples and oranges at this point: Comparing a recent Secretary of State with positive name recognition and negatives only from years in the past to GOP politicos who have been actively engaged in partisan politics up to the present time. Those numbers have virtually zero significance to how an actual campaign would shape up, as things like a candidate's presence, personality, image, and style come to the forefront - none of which are likely to be counted among Hillary Clinton's native advantages. Nor have I ever seen evidence of any kind of inspiring, cohesive vision on her part - the closest her 2008 campaign ever came was just a hodgepodge of policy positions and constituency-targeted platitudes. I've seen no evidence of anything resembling the kernel of a Presidency in anything she's ever done, or anything she's ever shown herself to be, and I find it disturbing and surreal that she ever has been - let alone is again - considered a front-runner for this position.
Sorry if that sounds harsh, but we all know who this person is - all of us who don't suffer from amnesia, anyway - so I really wish some folks would just stop trying to delude themselves by projecting ill-suited roles on to a bureaucratic cipher whose significance virtually all boils down ultimately to the accomplishments of her husband. For people hoping to do another demographic first in 2016, I strongly urge you to find a different woman for the job. Hillary Clinton's limits are already known and characterized, and were reached a long time ago: She is an operator of policy machines and a manager of professional subordinates, not a leader of nations.
If you insist on trying to pretend she is something more than that simply because she's in a position to assume greater authority, I doubt very much that I would be surprised by the outcome. We have better, more talented, more courageous people than this available to lead, so there is no excuse for Hillary Clinton being the Democratic nominee in 2016, and even less excuse for we in the base to act like it's reasonable to favor her just because the cogs of the machine are once again turning around to her position. Very little has changed in the underlying case for her candidacy since 2008 - it was senseless then, and remains senseless. It shouldn't have to take someone like Barack Obama becoming Neo in the Party's Matrix for Democrats to make intelligent primary decisions: Sooner or later you just have to accept that the ability to collect job titles and weave webs in the Party machinery is not an argument for a presidential candidacy, and Hillary Clinton has never had anything more than that going for her.
As brutal as the reality may be, especially to people in her age cohort, she is a relic of a very dark era in American history that shepherded the collapse of progressive ideals and the rise of fascism in America - both transitions met with attitudes ranging between hand-wringing impotent fear and servile collaboration with their own oppressors. She established long ago that she is just not presidential material, so please, everyone, stop trying to wishful-think Hillary Clinton into something worthier than she is. Finding real candidates is always a less certain process than just defaulting to some machine-spider hack, but it's all there is - the one and only way to achieve anything. Find the people with the ideas and the talent, the passion and the ambition, the vision and the love. That's all that differentiates a political party from a social fraternity: The fact that it serves a higher purpose than itself and its members. From what I've seen of Hillary Clinton, she will never really understand that.