WELL OF COURSE HILLARY WON
Hillary Clinton certainly won the first Democratic debate. But if she couldn’t have beaten that forlorn bunch she should have suspended her campaign immediately.
On stage were five candidates with a median age of 65, and the only current office holder isn’t even a Democrat, but rather an independent socialist who called for “political revolution” – and was seconded!
Here was Clinton facing an even weaker field than Mitt Romney in 2012 – which is saying something – with the added advantage that her supposed rivals spent as much time praising her as they did offering oblique, usually embarrassed, criticisms.
While Sen. Bernie Sanders’ fans no doubt liked what they heard about redistributing the stuffing out of Wall Street and moving toward a Scandinavian-style system (seriously), his biggest moment of the night came when he absolved Clinton of her current scandal surrounding secret servers, hidden emails and classified information – rendering it dead and buried as a consideration for her primary rivals.
But they may not even be rivals anymore, if they ever were.
The former senators, Lincoln “The Block” Chafee and Jim “Father Time” Webb, were at the wrong debate. Webb was talking about the benefits of coal, gun rights and battlefield valor in Vietnam and Chafee playing up spending controls and tax cuts – they might as well have been speaking Mandarin.
Martin O’Malley tried to confront Clinton, but appeared instead to be running for America’s assistant principal, exuding his disappointment in a condescending tone. Depending on what O’Malley’s campaign costs to run and what he can raise, he can presumably hang in until the Iowa caucuses hoping for the weather to change. But we were not looking at the man who was going to break the Clinton machine.
Unless Vice President Joe Biden gets into the race – which looks less likely after the thumping Clinton delivered to her foes and her recent uptick in the polls – Clinton is getting back on the coronation track.
But how she’s going about it matters.
Clinton’s central talking point of the night was her own gender. Americans want an outsider not an insider? She’s outside the male gender, amirite sisters? Her difference from Obama: XX chromosome, y’all! Why was she late getting back from the potty? Lady stuff, Anderson. You wouldn’t understand…
So that’s not going to cut it.
Like Romney in 2012, she lacks the trust or passion of her party’s base. So like him, she has to shackle herself to unpopular or electorally dangerous stances on issues in a bid to secure a win.
There was plenty of loose talk about topics – gun control, global warming, crime and bank regulations, to name four – that would be fine fodder for general election attack ads and talking points.
And most of all, Clinton embraced the idea of running for a third Obama term. That helps keep Biden on the sidelines, but will be a drag with persuadable voters next year.
If things are coming to a quick conclusion, she still has time to un-flip some of the flops, or at least scale them back. But if Biden burns more time on the clock and Sanders and his army keep the pressure on – and one can expect they will – she will have to wait awhile.
And the longer she has to wait to pivot, the more ungainly it will be.
