The Weirdness, Oh, the Weirdness: The Hillary Campaign

This is a sort of jazz-equivalent post. Random notes in search of a theme.

I have admitted not being good at the political punditry game. Never have been. I, for example, thought that Mitt Romney would make a better president than Barack Obama, and for a brief moment thought Romney would win. I also voted for Sarah Palin in 2008--and her running mate, whoever that was--and thought she would have been better than Biden--and his running mate, whoever that was. I sure know how to pick 'em. The voters, at least lately, don't agree with me very often. I find myself shunned from polite company because of my punditry efforts--or perhaps because I never have seen a Star Wars, James Bond, X-Men, or Mission Impossible movie?

Anyhow, not to be deterred, my domestic politics punditry efforts continue. Today I express my amazement about one candidate, yes, my old boss, Hillary Clinton. The polls (here, for example) make me wonder, "How?" In nearly if not every poll, Clinton beats just about any GOP candidate. I see those polls, and while, of course, I am sure the "science" behind them is impeccable--as voters in Greece, UK, and Wisconsin recently discovered--but still notice that they don't respond to reality in my little world. Who are these Hillary Clinton fans? I have yet to meet anybody--outside of one ultra-liberal State Department employee--who thinks she would make a good president. I have the same issue with polling about Jeb Bush. I have met him, like him as a person, but have not met anybody who says he wants him as president; yet the poll numbers put him right up next to Trump. Who are the people getting polled? (Readers: Insert off color joke here about the American people getting polled/poled.)

Let's look at Hillary Clinton. She has a very long history of living large and in the public eye and accomplishing . . . nothing. Nothing as First Lady of Arkansas--except to serve as laundress for bribes--nothing as FLOTUS, nothing as Senator, and nothing as SecState. She has depended on her roguish husband to provide her a "career." She has endured all sorts of humiliations from him but has stuck with him to get wealth and power. That's it. Nothing else. She has shown herself as without a sense of shame, and has no apparent requirement that people around her have a moral compass--she certainly doesn't have one. She has surrounded herself with compliant, amoral yet ruthless toadies who treat her as she treats her husband, i.e., as a vehicle to wealth and power. For Hillary and her acolytes, Hillary is their north.

As First Lady she proved an egomaniacal disaster, who wanted "to be somebody." She tried to impose a weird--even stranger than Obamacare--health insurance scheme on the US; her "little" project, horribly mismanaged, sunk ignominiously out of sight and should have taken her political aspirations with it. As noted, she passed unnoticed as Senator. I have written before about my encounter with her in one of her early forays into foreign affairs; she continued that pattern of "it's all about me" while Secretary of State, and had zero accomplishments in that job. Let me modify that: zero accomplishments of benefit to the USA. She proved wonderfully productive for the Muslim world's Jihadis, Iran's Ayatollahs, Cuba's Castros, Venezuela's Chavez, and Russia's Putin. In sum, throughout it all, she has shown herself as a incompetent manager, a lousy leader, as well as a habitual liar, crook, and highly vindictive practitioner of the politics of personal destruction--ask Bill's "bimbos."

Her current presidential campaign is bizarre or brilliant, or both. It seems to be a hit-and-run guerrilla campaign in which the candidate rarely appears, takes almost no questions, gives opaque statements worthy of the Oracle of Delphi or an astrology chart, and has her staff issue little Tweeter bolts every so often. She hides most of the time behind a gaggle of spokesmen who lie about and rewrite her scandal-ridden history. Perhaps we can better described it as a version of "rope-a-dope." Let everybody throw what they've got at her now, and since our presidential campaigns have become so absurdly long, by the time we get to voting, nobody will remember or care. I can hear the line, "That's old news," bandied about in the future whenever somebody raises something about her past--as though "old" means "irrelevant." In addition, she has well-placed media whores who do their best to ensure that "scandal eruptions" remain under control. Democrat-run electoral fraud will occur on a scale never seen before (here, here, and here) and Clinton will rely heavily on the gaggles of useful idiots produced by universities. Can this work for her? Maybe. I don't know what impact the new and anarchic world of social media will have on a campaign plan that seeks total control over messaging. I don't know if black and women voters will come out in numbers for her. I also don't know if the GOP will get its act together. There's all sorts of stuff I don't know.

My powers as a pundit, as confessed above, are limited.

Ready for Hillary? Better be.