I read a story on Huffington Post today about how support for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race seems to be waning. Finally!
This is as it should be. She possesses neither the skill nor the charisma to energize independent voters or moderate Republicans to want to put another Democrat in the White House. The last Democrat to succeed a Democratic president through the electoral process and not succession upon death was James Buchanan. (Although the last Democrat elected to succeed a Democratic president was Al Gore, but that's another story.) Should we wish to break that cycle, we are going to have to nominate someone who hasn't spent 20+ years as a focus of Republican disdain.
I know a lot of Democrats are pushing for people like Bernie Sanders to be the nominee, but one needs only to look at the political scene here in Arizona to see how well the ideologically-pure-yet-completely-unelectable candidate does with Republicans. What we need is a progressive who can speak the language of conservatives while he makes the case that center-left economic policies have the best chance at continuing to move us out of the hole into which we fell in 2007-2008.
A look at some of the Democratic candidates who failed in past White House bids should be all the guidance we need in picking Obama's successor: William Jennings Bryan (three fucking times!), Adlai Stevenson (twice - ugh), Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis. See a pattern here? Ideologically pure but weak bordering on effete. Well, not Bryan so much, but Americans have never preferred their populism straight up; they want to be fooled.
While Hilary doesn't come across as weak and effete, she does come across as wooden, inaccessible, and insincere, and she will not speak a veiled populist message without seeming clunky and completely fake. I know it's heretical, but sadly, we will need to nominate a strong- and vigorous-appearing white male to succeed Obama if we want to keep control of the executive branch. The Republicans don't have to be able to campaign on facts, only with rhetoric about the America they believe they're living in, and they will look upon an inaccessible female Democratic candidate with even more disdain than that which they have for Obama. We were lucky that message didn't work in 2008 and even luckier in 2012; I don't believe we will be that lucky in 2016.
Predictions and political commentary are, of course, a dime a dozen. Let's see how this one plays out.