So here we are. Everybody thought it would be Hillary for the Democrats, although nobody expected it to take this long. No one seriously thought it would be Donald Trump for the Republicans until about six months ago, when it became apparent that nobody was taking shots at him and nothing he did – no stumbles, no gaffes, no outlandish statements – were enough to dent his support. And so we get here.
Hillary is less surprising. Twenty-five years ago, I asked a friend in New England what she thought of the Democrats who were orbiting New Hampshire ahead of the 1992 race. She thought for a moment and said “you know, the only one who really impresses me is the Arkansas governor’s wife.” And a quarter-century on, after a long and winding road that no one could have predicted, here she stands, the first woman to grasp the brass ring for a major American political party. Put her resume on a random white man – one term and change as Senator from New York, four years as Secretary of State, a decade as the functional equivalent of Special Advisor to the President – and it’s certainly as plausible as most of the candidates you get these days. Put it on, say, Hillary Smith, and in 2016 it’s by no means too thin to run on in a world where people treat Ben Carson or Carly Fiorina as anything but a joke.
But there’s that word: Clinton. Couple it with Hillary and you get the ur-demon of Republican nightmares since before Al Gore’s mule ploughed the furrow in which the first T1 cable would be laid. Hillary Clinton is shorthand for every single thing in the demonology of American conservatism: liberal, feminist, shrill, lawyer, ballbreaker, Your First Wife, corrupt and conniving and eager to enslave hardworking Americans and feed our military into the chipper shredder of Islam and political correctness. There is nothing you can say about her – or against her – that hasn’t been said multiple times already in the last two decades. If she seems stiff, paranoid, defensive – well, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And they are. And they have been.
California voters under 30 plump for Bernie over Hillary by a margin of almost 5 to 1. Part of it could be attributed to the 2008 campaign, where her march of inevitability ran on the rocks of Obama-mania and her team was rather graceless in the slow spiral to defeat. And in a potentially fatal error, much of the left bought into the memes of the right: the Clintons are corrupt, the Clintons are shady, the Clintons are conniving weasels in thrall to billionaires, perpetually on the make and eager to stab you in the back for their own gain. And a generation too young to remember Travelgate, to remember Whitewater, to remember Jerry Falwell selling lurid expose tapes about cocaine smuggling in Mena, to remember a Congressman shooting a melon or a pumpkin in his yard to prove Vince Foster couldn’t have committed suicide, too young to remember the Clinton Rules: those kids swallowed the old GOP story, hook line and sinker. And so a generation of millenials has genuinely convinced itself that a seventy-something gadfly from Vermont, an avowed socialist in a time where the GOP makes that the description for anyone left of Meghan Kelly and an avowed atheist when polling shows Americans would rather elect a Muslim or a homosexual first – that Bernie Sanders is somehow the Chosen One and that the superdelegates whose existence they decried four months ago should step in to elevate the second place finisher to the nomination as if he were a Bush.
But all Bernie can do at this point is make things worse. And he might. He’s not a Democrat, never has been, only joined the party a year ago to vie for the nomination (much to the chagrin of voters who can’t understand why you have to be a Democrat to vote in the Democratic primary in most states). Right now he’s in the same spot as Reagan in 1976 or Kennedy in 1980 or possibly Jesse Jackson in 1988 or Jerry Brown in 1992 – a second place finisher who could choose to fatally cripple the nominee. And an unpleasant number of his supporters are in the Ralph Nader 2000 spot, masturbating to their own purity and proclaiming that better Trump win than Hillary because it will cause the scales to fall from the eyes of The People and they will rise to claim their victory, and never mind how badly things go in the meantime. Electing George W. Bush was supposed to heighten the contradictions, and it got us an endless war and a jobless recession and basically stopped us entering the 21st Century.
And that matters, because waiting at the other end of the podium is the most improbable of candidates: a reality-TV figure claiming to be worth ten billion dollars who may not actually earn a half-million a year, a self-proclaimed real estate mogul whose present fortune mostly stems from licensing his name and image, an heir to great wealth who has seen four bankruptcies and three marriages and literally thousands of lawsuits. This bigot, this walking joke, this unreconstructable asshole is the Republican candidate for President of the United States, and he could yet win the office.
Because the rules have changed, and the traditional norms have been thrown out. No one would ever have considered the Presidency an entry-level job. Barack Obama’s four years in the Senate were considered dangerously thin at one point. You needed to be a governor, with executive experience, or a Senator with time served in national politics, if you wanted to be a candidate for the Oval Office. But at one point this year, the top three GOP candidates had not a day of elected service combined between them.
The norms have gone out the door, have been going out the door since Newt Gingrich ripped up “Folkways of the Senate” and attempted to elevate Speaker of the House to Prime Minister of the United States. The vast majority of Congress knows only life since the Contract With America, when the party sorting finally completed and the white South became irrevocably Republican. And the Republicans became irrevocably white-Southern, prone to that diabolical promise of the Dixie Sickness: you can make things how they used to be again. And the Southern style of politics took hold: with no policy differences of any kind within the party, everything came down to who could sling the shit. Who would promise the biggest tax cuts. Who would promise the biggest stick of military might. Who would come closest to the line in slandering and scapegoating immigrants, or Muslims, or African-Americans, or gays, or whatever was this year’s Other.
Government ground to a halt. Candidates for executive service literally died awaiting confirmation by a Republican Congress. There were multiple shutdowns, there was very nearly a default on sovereign debt, there was the first-ever dimunition of the credit rating of the United States of America – all in the service of slinging the shit. The seated President of the United States, duly elected, was somehow not qualified for office because he was secretly Muslim, secretly Kenyan, secretly a Soviet sleeper of some kind. None of the cultural or institutional standards of American politics were left standing in the service of slinging the shit.
In such circumstances, who would the Republican faithful choose for their standard-bearer but the most adept slinger of shit? A man who would leap over the line and openly appeal to racism? A man who would say exactly what came to mind and tell people exactly what they wanted to hear, no matter how impossible or outrageous or in open conflict with reality? The message of the last decade-plus of Republican politics has been that you, the taxpayer, are not only entitled to your own opinion; you are entitled to your own facts, and there is an entire media bubble of television stations and talk radio hosts and cable news and websites and email forwards that will gladly confirm those facts for you. And this Mighty Wurlitzer, this gigantic engine of hot air and bullshit, wheezed and coughed its way to the inevitable apotheosis of what American conservative thinking has degenerated to. Fifty years from Barry Goldwater to Donald Trump, from “A choice not an echo” to “We’re going to build a wall and Mexico will pay for it.” For the GOP, every electoral victory in the 21st century has been a vindication of moving to the right – and every defeat proof that moving even further right is required. Now, there is no policy position, there is no manifesto, there’s no set of underlying beliefs – there’s just slinging the shit.
And into this void steps the best available candidate. Better than an aging socialist from Ben & Jerry country, better than a second-string mayor and governor from Maryland, better than a barely-interested Southern white male who would have been a great DLC candidate in 1992. Is she the best candidate? Not at all. She’s fatally flawed in several ways, many of which are not even her fault. In a more sane election year, with a John McCain or Bob Dole or even a John Kasich at the top of the ticket, she’d probably be deader than fucking fried chicken. Too old (even if Reagan or Dole or McCain were older), too shrill (or any other sexist jibe you like), too scandal-riddled (even if most were the work of a lapdog press eager to feed on ‘controversy’), too much yesterday’s news. A candidate for the fantasies of aging second-wave feminists dreaming through their Tab and Virginia Slims, not for today, not for now.
But that’s not the choice on offer right now. There is no door number three. There is no splitting the difference. The choice is between a flawed woman with three decades in the public political eye and all the baggage and all the wisdom that goes with it, and the abyss. It’s not Hillary or some blow-dried manic pixie dream governor, it’s Hillary or leadership skills honed by posing on Celebrity Apprentice. It’s Hillary or the most openly racist national candidate for office since George Wallace. It’s Hillary or admit that we don’t really care about what happens to America – and Americans – anymore, possibly for good.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, age 68, of Chicago, Illinois, Wellesley ’69, Yale Law ’73 – you have exactly five months to save the world.