The Left Had No Use For Hilary Clinton When She Ran For President. Now That She Lost, She's Become Their Ideal Candidate

 

 

By any reasonable standard Bill Clinton exceeded the expectations of the progressive agenda. There were more appointments of women to high level cabinet offices and federal offices than any prior President and he named Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a leftist heroine, to the Supreme Court. He raised taxes and cut spending, making his administration the last in history to date to have a budget surplus. When it came for foreign affairs he was successful on several fronts including the Oslo Accords and the Dayton Accords.  And as the left constantly reminds us, he did all of this under the rise of Fox News, a trumped up impeachment charge and the rise of Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution. He is, to date, the last President to have his party gain seats in Congress in his final midterms.

So it’s somewhat odd that the most recent book about his administration is titled: A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism, arguing that it betrayed its progressives principles and capitulated to the right. It argues that Clinton’s decision to rely on Republican votes to overhaul welfare and liberalize trade were divisive of his own party – ignoring that Clinton was dealing with a Republican Congress for the last six years of his administration. Even the economic boom he ushered in, it considered a failure even though it ended under the W’s administration. In other words Bill Clinton’s failures were that he did not have the foresight to recognize the progressive agenda as it was only established in 2016. Obviously Bill Clinton’s failure was that his decided ‘Third Way’ of governing, helped by the coalition of the Blue Dog Democrats was wrong because in the eyes of progressive there is only one way to do things: their way.

I have always theorized that for progressives they would rather lose an election, by however huge a margin in a glorious, then compromise and win one.  The Mississippi governor’s race – one that a Democrat might have been able to win had not many so-called progressives sat out the election – is just the most recent example of this. Progressives are great on ideals but don’t want to bother to work to get them. Democracy is something they only care about as a zero-sum gain: as much as they say Republicans and conservatives are destroying America, they are less interested in Democrats winning office than Republicans being voted out. The ideal candidate for them is always the defeated one; the ideal leader always the one who loses.

Which is why the left, as much as they loathed the idea of Donald Trump becoming President, didn’t really want Hilary Clinton to win. This fit in with the impossible standards they’ve had for decades in which the Republicans are fascists, totalitarian, racists, who will destroy the world if they get into power but the Democrats are somehow just as bad because…they don’t embrace every single aspect of the left’s agenda which changes every five minutes if we’re lucky. That is why every time they bring up Trump, they mention the electoral college, voter purges, the email scandal, and Russian hacking as factors in Hilary’s ‘loss’. They leave out the fact that somewhere between 10 to 12 percent of Bernie Sanders voters said they voted for Trump in the general, not to mention the 2 percent who chose to vote for Jill Stein. The left will do anything but look in the mirror when it comes to the causes for their defeat. I have little doubt that even had Hilary won in 2016, they would have turned on her even faster than Fox News did.

But when Hilary Clinton lost she became the only candidate progressives love: a defeated one. They still wouldn’t vote for her if she ran again but since they love playing victim, they’ll use what she said. This brings me to their latest fundraising point: when they mention how the mainstream media covered in September of 2016 to Donald Trump’s supporters as a basket of deplorables.

Now the left, using the selective memory they always do, neglect to mention four years earlier Mitt Romney famous was caught saying at a closed door fundraiser: “47 percent of the nation isn’t going to vote for me.” The media jumped on that, as did understandably the left did. The mainstream media had every right to hold Hilary Clinton to the same standard that Romney had been – it was just as appalling and execrable a remark for any candidate for President to say.

Furthermore Hilary Clinton of all people should have known better. Her husband had won the Presidency in 1992 with just 43 percent of the popular vote. He won reelection with only slightly more than 49 percent of the vote. In what was inevitably going to be a close race, the last thing Hilary not only to isolate any swing voters but do something that was crucify here as being the kind of coastal elitist the Republicans accused of her being. This is the kind of thing the voting public needs to know about.

But the left is celebrating it – and fundraising off it – because to them that’s the only line in the entire campaign that they agree with 100 percent. Hilary’s only sin in their minds is the one they accuse the right of these days with such frequency: saying the quiet part out loud. In the minds of progressives, a large part of the nation – maybe 47 percent – has always been a basket of deplorables. If anything, they’ve leaned into that ever since Hilary said in 2016. Anyone who voted for Trump, lives in a  certain section of the country, listens to right-wing radio on a semi-regular basis, watches any cable news channel that is not MSNBC or (maybe) CNN, hasn’t gotten a college degree, lives in the rural parts of the country instead of a big city, is part of an identity group but votes Republican despite that, really anyone who does not one hundred percent agree with every aspect of the progressive agenda,  is completely irredeemable and doesn’t deserve even the right to vote. Why should Hilary Clinton  have been punished for speaking what all progressives in their heart know is true? Hell, for all we know maybe some radical leftists finally decided she talked the talk and voted for her because of that statement.

As we enter another election year we will be constantly reminded of the right’s long term battle plans to destroy the American democratic system as we know and turn the nation into a fascist state. I expect the loudest voices to come from the left who are more exasperated than afraid by this concept. After all, they only believe in democracy in the most tangential of ways and would be perfectly fine with a totalitarian government as long as their side was the one in charge. No they’re annoyed because that means that they will have to get off their lazy asses and campaign for a Democratic President they didn’t really want to vote for four years ago.

 It had nothing to do with his age; it had to do with the fact that they did not what Donald Trump to stay in office. I have little doubt they would have been happier if, on January 21^st 2021, Biden and Harris resigned and appointed Bernie as President and AOC as vice president. (Yes I know she wasn’t constitutionally eligible, but the left only cares about that when the Republicans are abusing it.)

Now they have to work all of their time and energy to support for a candidate who are disappointed by despite all of the impressive achievements he’s managed to accomplish in his first term on the leftist agenda. You see the standards the left has for a Democratic elected official are always based on what they don’t achieve rather than what they actually do. Since their agenda is impossible for democracy to accomplish, they will spent the election season doing what they always do: attacking the Republicans with slightly more fervor then they do Democrats. If they live in a swing state, they’ll vote; if they live in a deep red or deep blue one, they won’t even bother to register. And either way they will live in their perpetual state of disappointment and misanthropy that their impossible dreams were not achieved.

And either way the progressive fundraisers will keep using the voices of Hilary Clinton or Al Gore or Bernie to be their loudest voices. Because in their minds the only great Presidents are the ones that never win. And if the Democrats win, some of them will heave another sigh and say: “Damn. The fascists haven’t won yet. We have to keep saying its only temporary until anyone who might have a possible opposing agenda has been erased from existence.” In other words, they want to make sure the deplorables never get to have a voice.