Charles P. Pierce over at Esquire has a long article asking the question If Not Hillary, Who? Which, if one thinks about it, is an important question to ask. Pierce takes a look at the possibilities out there, and offers up some observations intended to shake up the conventional wisdom, a phrase which is an oxymoron if ever there was one.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
I really recommend reading the whole thing; Pierce notes that back in 2008 Hillary Clinton was widely presumed to be inevitable - until she wasn't. There are a number of players out there, but they're going under the radar as far as the MSM is concerned:
This is what "clearing the field" looks like. This is the conventional wisdom that, in our politics today and at this point in a presidential-election cycle, is always far more conventional than it is wise. Hillary Clinton has pride of place unlike any candidate in recent memory: She's the wife of a two-term president, a former senator from New York, and the former secretary of state. She has first call on the party's most talented campaign staffers, both nationally and in the states. She has first call on the party's most overstuffed wallets and on every local- and national-television camera from Iowa to New Hampshire and back again. This has been recognized tacitly by almost every other proposed potential candidate. Vice-president Joseph Biden is curiously (and uncharacteristically) reticent. Liberal darling Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts repeatedly has declined to run and signed a letter endorsing Clinton. Everybody else—ambitious senators like New York's Kirsten Gillibrand and ambitious governors like the dark lord, Andrew Cuomo, also of New York—is sitting back and waiting and silently asking themselves that question, running it through their own silent hubris until it produces an answer.
Question: What if she doesn't run?
Pierce generates some more questions: what if she can't run? What if she can be beaten in the primaries? He looks at some of the likely candidates who might step into that cleared field, and find it gives them room to maneuver. (He also dashes off a quick summary of the GOP field that's worth a look in its own right.)
Pierce looks at history, and why inevitability is bad for the party and bad for the country. Pierce reminds us we've been here before.
The political parties nonetheless largely were closed shops until the great Progressive movement of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, which produced the direct election of U.S. senators and the direct primary system, regarded by Republican reformers like Robert La Follette of Wisconsin as critical to breaking up the unholy wedlock of big corporate money and all the institutions of government that had cleared the field for what had become a politico-economic puppet show. As Matthew Josephson writes in The President Makers, his brilliant study of the period: "The clamor for 'more direct democracy,' often heard from the West, the demands for stronger control of the railroads and trusts, for the curbing of the speculation in grains, for tariff reform (in the interest of the agriculturalists), for direct primaries … the cry for all that would equalize the political unbalance now rose stronger than ever, a crescendo of protest."
In 1911, when he founded the National Progressive Republican League, La Follette made direct primaries one of that organization's founding principles. There always has been a kind of instinctive underground resistance to the idea of the cleared field, a kind of autonomic reflex in a democratic republic that pushes back against an idea that's seen as being an affront to what the country fashions itself in its own mind to be, an occasional inchoate desire to break through what Josephson calls "the old superstitious limits of the parties." If we must have political parties in a democracy, history tells us, then they must constantly be made to move toward being more democratic, election by election.
emphasis added
Again, I strongly urge everyone to read the whole thing. Pierce brings up some important history and considers the alternatives; what they might offer, and what is out there beyond the conventional wisdom.
If Hillary Clinton seems inevitable at this point (but what if she's not?), then the question should be asked: why? What exactly does she bring to the table other than name recognition, connections, money, and a ready-made narrative for the press and everyone else to take up? How exactly does she make the case that she has anything new and useful to bring to the campaign, above and beyond being Hillary Clinton? What does she offer above and beyond reinforcing a political establishment and established players who are notably falling short and failing to deliver real answers to the challenges facing this country? How do we influence a system that puts its own preservation ahead of all else?
There's a pretty large segment of the population that feels the country is on the wrong track. (They disagree about who to blame and why, depending on which side of the political spectrum they fall of course.) There are urgent problems which no one seems to be addressing effectively. (Outright sabotage of government is one reason - but there's also some huge inertia in the system against anything but business as usual.) And then there's human nature. In a rather exotic context, there's an observation that seems to apply.
"There's no question about the crime," observed the ambassador, "or that it is primarily political. You proposed to improve a technical process in a society which considers itself beyond improvement. If you'd succeeded, the idea of change would have spread, people now poor would have gotten rich, people now rich would have gotten poor, and you'd have done what all governments are established to prevent. So you'll never be able to walk the streets of this planet again in safety. You've scared people."
"Yes, sir," said Hoddan. "It's been an unpleasant surprise to them, to be scared."
The ambassador put the tips of his fingers together.
"Do you realize," he asked, "that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?"
"I hadn't thought of it in just those words, sir—"
"It is one of the most-avoided facts of life," said the ambassador. "Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable. And you have offended against everything that is the foundation of a stable and orderly and damnably tedious way of life—against civilization, in fact."
emphasis added
We're a long way from a Golden Age, but fear is certainly present - but it's fear being used by the establishment (the 1% among others, for whom it IS a Golden Age) to protect their interests against the possibility of change. Issues that should generate viable, useful fear are being marginalized; anyone who brings them up risks being attacked from all sides! And that is the problem of the cleared field. There's no 'there' there, no questions - and no real answers.
Pierce's concluding paragraph (which I won't quote here - go to the link, it's at the bottom) is worth reading because it's a telling summary of everything that's wrong with the conventional wisdom and politics as usual.
RTWT