BECAUSE THE CLINTONS TOOK IT OVER LIKE PARASITIC WASPS LONG AGO: Democratic Machine Chose Clinton Long Ago. But Why?

Before I go on, I should stop and say: this is not about whether Clinton would be a good president. This is about getting to the Oval Office in the first place. We are not living under a parliamentary system where the party leadership can decide, after a brief internecine squabble, who gets to sit in the big chair. In American politics, you have to actually get elected. It’s not enough to be effective at party politics, or even a wizard at policy. You have to actually be good at making people like you. Something that Clinton has never shown much aptitude for.

Being only middling likable myself, I’m certainly sympathetic. But you see, this is one reason that I am not running for president, and why, if I ever suggested such a daft thing, I would hope that the people around me would stage a tactful yet firm intervention. Instead, everyone around her rushed to enable her dream — and put the party in a position where it now has a real shot at making her the woman who lost the Oval Office, not just to Barack Obama, but also to Donald Trump, a man who clearly struggled over whether to distance himself from the Ku Klux Klan; a man who stage-managed his own convention into a series of own-goals, from his wife’s plagiarized speech to the sight of a primary rival getting booed off the stage; a man who started off his post-convention campaign by rambling about a theorized connection between said primary rival’s dad and the man who shot President Kennedy. Bill Clinton could have defeated Trump with one hand tied behind his back, a bag over his head, and a debilitating case of laryngitis. His wife is, at this point, struggling to hold even. I still think she’s a favorite to win. But it never should have been close enough for anyone to care about the size of Trump’s post-convention bounce.

Notice that I haven’t even gotten to the e-mails — a story that broke in March of last year, the point at which it was still, if barely, possible for someone to sit down and say “for the good of the party, I’m afraid you need to develop a serious health issue that will require you to drop out of the race.”

Actually, I believe that’s scheduled for September.