Only in America (probably) could a woman running for office who received 2.7 million more votes than her opponent be reviled and ridiculed as a “loser”. Yet such is the hard fate of the hard to love Hillary Rodham Clinton.
If I were really mean, I would say that Hillary can’t stop stepping on her own dick—and, obviously, I are. It’s fun to be mean, and Hillary brings out the worst in us. Those glasses! That fat ass! Those pantsuits! Plus, she lost the election! Loser! Loser! Loser!
But only thanks to that eighteenth century monument to periwigged, petty elitist log-rolling, the U.S. Constitution, which protects the “rights” (that is to say, the interests) of small, rural states, who are somehow more important than the rest of us.1 In a juster world than ours, Hillary Clinton would be the ruthless, steely-eyed Iron Lady of American politics, so to speak, and Donald Trump its laughable beached whale. Imagine! The guy actually thought he could win! With that do? And the Republicans bought it! They actually bought it! Hey Republicans! Have I got a bridge for you!
But that world ain’t this one, and in this one Hillary did lose, and nowhere in politics does the classic one-liner “Never complain, never explain”, attributed variously to Benjamin Disraeli and long-time Chicago boss Richard Daley, apply so completely as to the poor pol who suffers a tough loss. If you get crushed, well, you got crushed. You never had a chance. But if you lose by a hair, well, you just didn’t have the cojones to push it into the end zone.
Which is why, even though Hillary’s post-mortem, What Happened, airs some reasonable gripes, the shocking fact is, life isn’t fair, especially when you’re running for president. If you’re running for president, you’re supposed to be able to cope, with anything. Because if you can’t handle the bullshit you get running for president, how in the hell can you handle the bullshit you’ll get being president?
Furthermore, if Hillary could stand to look at herself in the mirror for one second, which I don’t think she can, she might realize how utterly stupid and self-indulgent it was for her to use her own private email server as secretary of state as an obvious end-run around the Freedom of Information Act; how badly her attempts to, um, wipe away the initial controversy over the private server played with the press, igniting all their latent “Hate Hillary” hormones; how stupid it was to take massive six-figure payoffs from outfits like Goldman Sachs for repeating to them all the neoliberal clichés she’d already told them a dozen times2; how stupid it was of her and her husband not to dial back the Clinton Foundation cash machine once she became secretary of state.
If Hillary had avoided even the first of these howlers, there is no doubt she’d be president, no matter how bitchy Bernie was and no matter how Trumpy Donald was. And we’d be better off.3
Of course, if Hillary had not only avoided these blunders but had the wit to see that “regime change"—easily the most pernicious of her many vices—was an atrocious idea instead of a good one, we (and the Libyans) would have been spared the disastrous invasion of that poor country, and we would all be living in a different and better world. That, clearly, was too much to ask.
Afterwords: The Revenge of Hillary?
Well, at this writing, Hillary does have something to gloat about. Republicans were going to deep six ObamaCare/HillaryCare? More likely, they’ll save it! And is Trump going to destroy DACA? Maybe he’ll enshrine it! Talks like Donald, walks like Hillary? Well, that’s where the votes are!
- In the past, conservatives didn’t like the Electoral College because it didn’t discriminate enough against the large states. After Richard Nixon’s narrow loss to JFK in 1960, a “thoughtful” Ronald Reagan suggested that the EC should be “revised” to give a single vote to each congressional district, which, coincidentally enough, would have given the victory to Richard Milhous. Since I live in Washington, DC, my vote is actually magnified by the Electoral College—DC’s 3 votes constitute 0.6% of the total Electoral College vote, but our 600,000 inhabitants are only 0.2% of the nation’s population. But what really hurt Hillary was not losing the small states but that so much of her vote was concentrated in California and New York, enormous majorities that were downsized by the effects of the Electoral College. ↩︎
- Clichés that I agree with, like the remarkable power—though not the infallibility—of free markets and the desirability of both free trade and low barriers to immigration. We can ignore, for the moment, Hillary’s remarkable appetite to regulate almost everything else in our lives. ↩︎
- In foreign policy, this is only marginally true. Trump is certainly more likely to get us into a war by accident, while Hillary is more likely to get us into a war by design. Smart power! It’s a killer! ↩︎
