“Hillary Clinton campaign-in-waiting increasingly strikes me as a large and dangerous Potemkin Village for the Democratic party,” Rick Wilson writes at Ricochet today:
Like anyone with ambitions and a boss to keep happy, Potemkin swung into action to make the Royal progress memorable. Setting aside his actual accomplishments of military victories and the construction of cities, fortresses, armories, ports and so on, history remembers Potemkin primarily by legend that he constructed phony villages stocked with smiling, fake peasants to give Catherine the impression all was well on his watch. This largely anecdotal event became a cautionary tale of how leaders are manipulated by a crafted and shaped version of the landscape before them.
Which is why the Hillary Clinton campaign-in-waiting increasingly strikes me as a large and dangerous Potemkin Village for the Democratic party. Certainly, Hillary is formidable: near-universal name identification, an adoring media (not, in fairness, as adoring as Obama’s), Bill Clinton’s phenomenal political skills, and the perfect stunt-casting as She Who Will Shatter The Ultimate Glass Ceiling. She’ll raise billions of dollars (yes, that’s billions with a “b”) for her campaign, the DNC, and superPACS. She is inevitable, inexorable, and indisputably the front-runner for the Democratic nomination in 2016.
But what if there’s no there there? What if the media perception of Hillary is so off the charts into self-deception that Democrats find, as they did in 2008, that “inevitability” and “Hillary” aren’t one and the same? What happens if she crashes out in Iowa or New Hampshire? The lessons of 2008 have been almost entirely forgotten, even by Republicans who should know better. Checking every box with every Democratic interest group except for the Iraq War vote made Hillary the certain nominee and should have made her President, right? Hardly.
Read the whole thing. As Wes Pruden wrote at the start of the year at the Washington Times, “Every night’s going to be Halloween night for Hillary. The skeletons in her closet are signing up now for the conga line. They’re impatient to put on their dancing shoes for the 2016 presidential campaign. Like it or not, it’s just around the corner.”
QED:
Video: Claire McCaskill, who doesn’t want Bill Clinton near her daughter, angry at Rand Paul for insulting Bill… http://t.co/NpKpJR4EZX
— HotAir.com (@hotairblog) January 28, 2014
And just a reminder that the left really is “Potemkin Villages All the Way Down.”
Update: “MSNBC’s Joy Reid: GOP Bringing Up Clinton Lewinsky Affair ‘Might Be the Definition of the War on Women.’”
Basil Fawlty, call your office — you too, George Orwell.
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