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The Soul Of The Clinton Machine

Wikileaks makes even more manifest what has been obvious all along: that there is no soul
broken-down-car

Charles Krauthammer, explaining why he’s not voting for either Trump or Clinton, says this about Hillary, in light of the recent Wikileaks revelations:

The soullessness of [Clinton’s] campaign — all ambition and entitlement — emerges almost poignantly in the emails, especially when aides keep asking what the campaign is about. In one largely overlooked passage,Clinton complains that her speechwriters have not given her any overall theme or rationale. Isn’t that the candidate’s job? Asked one of her aides, Joel Benenson: “Do we have any sense from her what she believes or wants her core message to be?”

It’s that emptiness at the core that makes every policy and position negotiable and politically calculable. Hence the embarrassing about-face on the Trans-Pacific Partnership after the popular winds swung decisively against free trade.

So too with financial regulation, as in Dodd-Frank. As she told a Goldman Sachs gathering, after the financial collapse there was “a need to do something because, for political reasons . . . you can’t sit idly by and do nothing.”

Of course, we knew all this. But we hadn’t seen it so clearly laid out. Illicit and illegal as is WikiLeaks, it is the camera in the sausage factory. And what it reveals is surpassingly unpretty.

Read the whole thing. 

Who on the left is genuinely excited about voting for Hillary Clinton? Sure, there are some, but she strikes me as being a Democratic figure who’s a lot like Mitt Romney was on the Right: the perfect distillation of a kind of Establishmentarianism within their own party. (I hasten to say that whatever my disagreement with Romney over policy might have been, he always struck me as a thoroughly decent person. Hillary Clinton … not.) It is hard to think of two more different figures on the Right than Mitt Romney and Donald Trump — temperamentally and otherwise. Yet within four years, the GOP convulsed so much that it got Donald Trump. What Trump’s triumph over the GOP Establishment showed was its deep weakness. It just needed a strong push.

Might that be the case for the Democrats post-Clinton? Who is the Donald Trump of the Democratic Party? Where might he come from? I don’t think we can see him (or her) now, but I have a hunch that he’s out there. I find it hard to believe that the Democrats are not going to be immune to the same economic and cultural forces that dismantled the GOP. I could be wrong. Her sort of conniving, careerist, technocratic liberalism surely is not long for this world. Yes?

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