Hillary’s Message: It’s 1992 in America

There is a wonderful, pompous, trundling inevitability about Hillary Clinton’s formal declaration as candidate for president. For at least the next year – 20 months if we have not suffered enough by next April – 315 million Americans will be subjected to the endlessly reiterated Big Lie, ridiculous even by the standards of other American politicians that “she really cares”, and that “she is really one of us.”

Even her announcement, so endlessly pondered over, could not escape the usual Hilarious Hillary Pratfall (HHP). It announced that “she had “always fought women and children.” (Perhaps this will give her the experience and skill she will need to fight off Elizabeth Warren’s own hilarious and surely coming “Campaign of Destiny.”

They meant to say, of course, that she had “always fought for women and children.”

But as the late British journalist and writer Malcolm Muggeridge loved to say, God is revealed through the typos.

There is always a HHP – a Hilarious Hillary Moment. Remember when she took office as secretary of state and solemnly presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a bright red plastic button with the word “reset” written on it? The button was manufactured in China. And when you pressed it, it didn’t work.

Of course, the Russians were mildly disgusted by the combination of arrogance, condescension and sheer infantile self-indulgence signaled by the gesture. And then came the reality: Four years of Hillary’s unrelenting ineptitude as secretary of state when U.S.-Kremlin relations sank to a worse state than they had ever been since the darkest moments of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Hillary chose Michael McFaul, a former Carnegie Endowment analyst on Russia and human rights activist, as her ambassador to Moscow. The Roman Emperor Caligula did far less harm when he appointed his favorite horse to the Roman Senate. The horse did no harm. The clownish McFaul outraged and disgusted every Russian official with whom he interacted. That was not the way to advance U.S. national interests with a thermonuclear superpower capable of destroying us. But selecting him for the job was another HHP. It was another typical Hilarious Hillary Moment.

Then there is the new campaign “strategy,” unveiled with such fan-fare. Democratic Party “strategists “described it to the indefatigable Anne Gearan and Dan Balz of the Washington Post. Gearan and Balz dutifully reported that Hillary was pursuing a “go-slow, go-small strategy.” As if a campaign with the extraordinary estimated capitalization of $2.5 billion could ever imagine “going small.” They were told that this strategy would play to Hillary’s strengths “allowing her to meet voters in intimate settings where her humor, humility and policy expertise can show through.”

As George Orwell recognized one of the many comforts of living in a truly free society should be the freedom to laugh without fear at such a ludicrous Big Lie.

In all her glorious 23 years in the national eye as wife of a front-running Democratic presidential candidate, wife of the president of the United States, junior senator from New York and third female secretary of state. Hillary’s public humor has been nonexistent. Its existence has been a national secret more closely guarded than the existence of leprechauns.

A person whose entire adult life has been spent in the naked and avid pursuit of national power is described to a national newspaper as embodying “humility.”

As to the “policy expertize,” where exactly? Can anyone point to a single example of it? Any time? Anywhere? The trade deficit with China she did nothing to reduce? The two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq she did nothing to end? The Middle East peace process she did nothing to advance? The relations with the Russian thermonuclear superpower she did nothing to improve?

There is a wonderful inevitability to this colossal Walking Dead zombie of a national campaign. It is dead on its feet before it even starts.

Hillary seems to know it too. Every laughing, “full of vitality and joy photo” of her, proclaims its own unique fraudulence. At 69, after a quarter century of national humiliations and pratfalls, she cannot point to a single lasting achievement in anything. She will try to run as the “candidate of change.” But everyone knows she is the candidate of privilege, insider-trading, lies and status quo. She has yet to suggest a single new idea or policy in her campaign.

The only candidate she can dream of matching is the equally woeful Jeb Bush, aged 65. Jeb is a figure of such sorry, shambling cut that he makes the even the not-so-long-gone and far-from-forgotten Big Brother George look like a dynamo of intelligence, action and charisma by contrast.

Hillary cannot help but run as the candidate of incumbency. Almost all her senior campaign staff are predictable, cautious old retreads from 24 years of old Clinton and Obama races,

Perhaps Hillary can get away with packaging this as nostalgia. “It’s 1992 in America” still has a certain mad ring to it. When all the fraudulent ideas of the future had yet to be tested and a national public could be conned into thinking it just might work.