The empty pantsuit

In response to What Makes Hillary So ‘Inevitable’ in 2016?:

I’ve been wondering the same thing, because even if you overlook the rather difficult-to-overlook-but-by-God-the-media-will-try matter of Benghazi, the State Department under Hillary was a mess.  If memory serves correctly, there were at least half a dozen scandals and cover-ups in progress, including some nasty business with very young prostitutes.  

And then, of course, you’ve got Benghazi, which is either Hillary’s greatest regret or a phony scandal cooked up by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy, depending on what mood you catch her in.  The Benghazi scandal is a story of staggering incompetence (of a degree we would see again when Healthcare.gov went live, or as “live” as it could get) and politics trumping everything else, including the safety of Americans in dangerous locales overseas.  The striking thing about Benghazi is that Hillary’s defenders paint it as the kind of bungle that should keep her out of high office for the rest of her life.  

About the best thing she’s got going for her is that she was succeeded by the spectacular clown act of John Kerry, who helped Vladimir Putin run the United States out of the Middle East on a rail.  If I didn’t remember Kerry’s act so well from 2004, I’d think he was deliberately sabotaging American foreign policy in a bid to make everyone forget how inert Hillary Clinton was.

We don’t have to think too hard about the source of Hillary’s political strength: robot Democrat voters, hard-core identity politics, and nostalgia for the fantasy version of Bill Clinton’s presidency that Democrats have been finger-painting into the public mind since 2000.  The other thing about Hillary is that she’s the kind of candidate the Left loves to field: someone with prodigious “credentials” but no actual achievements.  

This is an era in which we’re supposed to fall silent when someone with the right credentials speaks.  Hillary boosters will be happy to rattle off her long hypothetical political resume, especially if she’s running against an outsider candidate, or someone who doesn’t have a long history of prestigious awards, a closet full of media laurels, or a high profile on the national stage – say, a governor who left college early, fought back multiple well-financed efforts by special interests to drum him out of office,  and has been busy leading his state into a remarkable economic turnaround (complete with budget surpluses) instead of racking up a million frequent-flyer miles doing nothing except padding out a mileage total for a future political campaign.