Now there’s a blog title you don’t see much in here.’
Maureen Dowd’s latest column, which appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, is excellent.
Titled “Weakend At Bernie’s” (no typo), it discusses how weak Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is not to have quickly dispatched a nothing from nowhere like Bernie Sanders.
A few choice excerpts:
HILLARY CLINTON is the Democratic nominee.
…she is reduced to stomping her feet on CNN, asserting her dominance in a contest that has left her looking anything but dominant. Once more attempting to shake off the old socialist dude hammering her with a sickle, Clinton insisted to Chris Cuomo on Thursday: “I will be the nominee for my party, Chris. That is already done, in effect. There is no way that I won’t be.”
After all, why should Bernie Sanders get to be the Democratic nominee when he isn’t even a Democrat? And how is Donald Trump going to be the Republican nominee when he considers being a Republican merely a starting bid?
It must be hard for Hillary to look at all the pictures of young women swooning over Bernie as though he were Bieber.
She assumed that the fix was in, that she and the D.N.C. had arranged for the coronation that she felt she was robbed of in the tulip craze of 2008.
Everyone just laughed when Sanders, a cranky loner from Vermont with a nondescript Senate record, decided to challenge Queen Hillary. Clinton and her aides intoned — wink, wink — that it would be healthy to have a primary fight with Sanders and Martin O’Malley.
But Bernie became the surprise belle of his side’s revolutionary ball. And now he has gotten a taste of it and he likes it and he won’t let it go. He’s bedeviling the daylight out of Hillary.
Hopeful acceptance of Hillary has shifted to amazed disbelief that she can’t put away Bernie. Given dynasty fatigue and Hillary’s age, many Democrats assumed that their front-runner would come out of the gate with a vision for the future that gave her campaign a fresh hue, instead of white papers tinkering around the edges. She should have been far over her husband’s bridge to the 21st century and way down the highway by now.
The 2016 race is transcendentally bizarre. We have two near-nominees with the highest unfavorables at this point in the race of any in modern history. We seem to have a majority of voters in both parties who are driven by the desire to vote against the other candidate, rather than for their own.
Debbie Wasserman Schultz tries to herd young women to Hillary by raising the specter of Roe v. Wade being overturned. And former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell said Trump’s obsession with “10s” and D-cups would “come back to haunt him’’ and give Democrats wins because “there are probably more ugly women in America than attractive women”.
Hillary can’t generate excitement on her own so she is relying on fear of Trump to get her into the White House. And Trump is relying on fear of everything to get him into the White House.
So voters are stuck in the muck of the negative: What are you most afraid of?
Yes, Maureen Dowd gets in her licks against Donald Trump. This is to be expected given her long-time political lean – and, in any event, Donald Trump certainly earns the negatives she tosses his way.
But somewhere in there is a surprisingly candid assessment of Hillary Clinton. And for that, my imaginary hat (I don’t wear them) is off to Ms. Dowd.
