Hillary Clinton’s dull, lifeless speech on Thursday night marked a historic moment. Democrats did something unprecedented this week.
Despite what you’ve heard, it’s not that they nominated a woman. It’s that they nominated the person next in line, the one whose “turn” it was to run for president.
That’s what Republicans used to do. But Democrats had to change their habits because their party bench was devastated in two consecutive midterm elections, so there were few alternatives. There was no JFK, no Jimmy Carter, no Bill Clinton, no Barack Obama to come out of nowhere and inject new life into their party.
The only serious dark horse candidate to challenge Clinton was a septuagenarian socialist, whom Clinton still overcame only with difficulty and the duplicitous help of the Democratic National Committee.
The Democrats’ thin presidential field set them up for the inevitable choice of an uninspired and uninspiring candidate, who is already well-defined in the public mind as a political hack. She is not only the status quo candidate, but also a person characterized by incessant, self-serving lies, unbounded venality and the evident belief that rules are for people less important than herself.
This week’s convention has been an effort to reinvent Clinton — how many times has that been tried? — but it was a waste of their time.
On Tuesday, her husband Bill tried to reinvent her as a “change-maker,” precisely the sort of dynamic reformer that no one in either party believes her to be. On Wednesday, Obama tried to reinvent her as the incarnation of his own third term. This may prove truer from a policy perspective, but she lacks the charm and appeal that he brought to the political stage in 2008.
All of this week’s worst and least memorable speeches, including that of Chelsea Clinton, focused on Clinton herself. (When other politicians praise her honesty, it can provoke nothing but hollow laughter.) And what all of the week’s best speeches had in common, including both Obama’s and that of Khizr Khan, a Muslim and father of an Army officer killed in Iraq, is that they barely mentioned Hillary. They were mostly about other people, and mostly about why Donald Trump must not be elected. No one wants to talk about Hillary Clinton.
She’s just so uninspiring. We’re still more than three months away from the election, and already people are bored with her. It takes most presidents about seven years to get to this point.
Sen. Chuck Schumer said Thursday that Trump has reached his high water mark, but Democrats left their convention nervous. Clinton’s campaign manager is in denial about her unpopularity, which stems from the fact that about 70 percent of the public believes her to be dishonest and untrustworthy.
The Democrats’ best chance is that their voters turn out from fear of a Donald Trump presidency. If this race were just about love of Hillary, she’d lose in a landslide.
