This would seem to be a particularly odd and unusual time to hear people talking up the prospects of a Hillary Clinton comeback. And yet, here we are. Juan Williams, writing in the Hill:
Democrats need a strong voice ready to fight to restore women’s rights, now that the Supreme Court has struck down Roe v. Wade.
There’s only one Hillary Clinton.
. . . Clinton is exactly the right person to put steel in the Democrats’ spine and bring attention to the reality that “Ultra-MAGA” Republicans, as President Biden calls them, are tearing apart the nation.
John Ellis, who is usually pretty astute and thought-provoking, and who might just be trolling here:
Now is her moment. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade creates the opening for Hillary Clinton to get out of stealth mode and start down the path toward declaring her candidacy for the 2024 Democratic presidential nomination.
Ellis does lay out the legitimate points that Biden is too old, few Democrats have any faith in Kamala Harris, and the Democratic bench is weak. But those problems do not naturally lead to the conclusion that it is time for Hillary Clinton to come out of retirement.
Hillary Clinton is 74 years old, and will be 77 years old on Election Day 2024, numbers that look young only compared to Joe Biden. (She is one year, four months, and twelve days younger than Donald Trump.) She is the only person on earth who has lost a general election to Donald Trump. The last time she won a general election was her Senate reelection campaign in 2006, which was before the iPhone was invented. The last time Hillary Clinton won a general election, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was a graduate student at Oxford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was an undergraduate at Boston University, and senator Jon Ossoff was an undergraduate at Georgetown University.
A poll from earlier this year found Hillary Clinton with 97 percent name recognition; 36 percent said they like her, and 41 percent said they do not like her. Perhaps the most surprising aspect of Clinton’s reputation in those numbers is how many Americans no longer have much of an opinion about her at all. In many ways, the modern Democratic Party has moved on from her. Her recent advice to Democrats to stop focusing on fringe issues didn’t even generate much of a stir:
“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window,” she says. “Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”
Another instance is the “defund the police” campaign, she adds. “You need accountable measures. But you also need policing. It doesn’t even pass the common-sense politics test not to believe that. Some positions are so extreme on both the right and the left that they retreat to their corners . . . Politics should be the art of addition not subtraction.”
Not only are most Americans not looking to Hillary Clinton to guide them out of our current political and social divisions; most Democrats aren’t looking to her, either.
None of this suggests that she is a strong choice to be the face of Democrats in the midterms, nor a good choice to be the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2024. But you know who’d probably love to see Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee next time?
