Last week I wrote that Bill Clinton, deep down, didn’t really want his wife to be president. On reflection, I don’t think she really wants to be president either. And for that matter, neither does Jeb Bush.
Both Jeb and Hillary think they want to be president, have had it in their dreams for umpteen years, but now, faced with the reality, they don’t know why they’re doing it. At least they don’t act that way. They are lost people, running not on fumes, but on habit. They’re supposed to run. They were bred to run. But they don’t have a clue where they want to lead the country, not in any passionate sense.
With Hillary, of course, it’s hard to know what in the world she’s thinking because she’s been incommunicado for over two, going on three, months, since she had that shifty-eyed press conference at the UN to answer questions about her stupefying email erasures. (Imagine if a Republican had insisted he or she couldn’t have two email accounts on one smartphone. Forget the presidency, they wouldn’t be allowed to run for dogcatcher. Crucifixion by media!)
And now she would have to answer endless questions about the Clinton Foundation and every tin pot dictator from Baku to Ulan Bator, not to mention last Friday’s revelation from the New York Times that Bill and Hill personally made $30 million in 16 months. Do they play in the NBA? … Never mind. It’s okay. They’re for the middle class. Right? (I guess that depends on what your definition of middle class is — those earning at least $14 but not more than $28 million a year.)
While making this killing, Hillary, I’m sure, was coming up with original programs that will set this country on the right course again. Well, no. Go to the hillaryclinton.com website and this first (and only) thing you get are not ideas but a place to give her campaign your email so you may donate. Failing that, there’s an opportunity to donate without giving her your email. (“And just go ahead and donate!” it says, that last donate with the exclam written in red, lest you miss it.) These Clintons — the world well knows now — are about the Benjamins. Policies, not so much.
And what would she have to say anyway but some variation on the same liberal pabulum we’ve been hearing since LBJ finished his business, hiked up his drawers and walked out of the White House bathroom to declare the “War on Poverty.” How’s that been going? (A list of liberal causes in a Washington Post piece by Anne Gearan that Hillary is suddenly espousing feel like a bloodless construct entirely from focus groups, the concoction of a slumming millionairess.)
Most of all, the truth about Hillary is, besides the endless prevarications, she’s a bore, not a competent bore like, say, Calvin Coolidge, just a plain old fashioned bore we all wish would just go away. And this is 21 months or so before she’d even be inaugurated. Frankly, I’d prefer Bernie Sanders. At least he stands for something, even if that something is socialism which, Hayek and others have shown us over and over, eventually leads to mass murder. (Well, scratch that.)
Which leads me to Jeb. Sigh. He seems like a nice guy and all, but he too is pretty boring with an extended shelf life. (Oh, ye Bushes and Clintons!) He’s been sticking to his guns on some issues, kind of, which I suppose is laudable, no matter how you stand on said issues, and I guess he was doing okay until he ran into a buzzsaw named Megyn Kelly, who asked him some questions about a war his brother was involved with. Poor Jeb jumped the shark on Iraq, misunderstood a simple question and then didn’t correct himself for two days, not a good sign.
Peggy Noonan took Jeb to the woodshed in the Wall Street Journal. “He goes from misunderstanding the question to saying he isn’t sure of the answer to let’s not make soldiers suffer by asking it to OK, I wouldn’t have gone in. He looked hunted when he said that.” And she wrote this after calling rival Marco Rubio “an impressive figure…. He has in his head a fact-horde, which is immediately accessible to him as he speaks. You get the impression no briefing has ever been wasted on him. And he’s quick…. Whereas Mr. Rubio was sharp, alive and in the game, Jeb Bush limped shruggingly along. I don’t understand his inability to deal with Iraq.” (This probably wasn’t lost on the Republican donor class who, I would wager, read the WSJ.)
So, as I said, although in slightly different ways, Hillary and Jeb both seem as if they don’t want to be there. And aside from a few feminists still wearing faded Gloria Steinem t-shirts from their 1972 era consciousness raising groups (happily with bras now), I don’t think many of us want them to be there either.
Enough of these Bush and Clinton dynasties. That was never the plan for this country, but we want to go back to the Divine Right of Kings, at least let’s have Richard III or Henry VIII for a little excitement. A Jeb-Hillary election would be so soporific the country might go to sleep until the next millennium. And by the time we wake up, we won’t even have a Congress. We’ll have an Assembly of Experts.
Roger L. Simon – Co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media – is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and multi-award winning novelist. You can read more of his blogs about the 2016 election here at Diary of a Mad Voter.
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