It is one of the delights of the committedly progressive mind that it can never contemplate the notion of its own fallibility. Ask Hillary Clinton why she lost and the response is a list of various and sometimes contradictory excuses longer than the cloyi
Li ke no other of his many performances, spoken or written, The Importance of Being Earnest is studded, packed to the brim, with the unequalled brilliance of Oscar Wilde’s wit. When it is established that its hero Jack Worthing ( the “Earnest” of the title) has “lost” both of his parents, the dour, droll Lady Bracknell serves up the classic response: “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”
Anyone who has read Shattered, the fresh “insider” account of Hillary Clinton’s second run for the presidency, will easily appreciate the relevance of Lady Bracknell’s crisp judgment. For her first loss, many people will kindly put it down to misfortune. Who could have thought that a candidate such as Barack Obama could emerge, that a mere freshman senator could roll the Clinton machine? Obama was a preternaturally gifted campaigner (as president we may tone down the estimate) and Hillary didn’t know, really couldn’t know, what hit her until it was too late.
The campaign of last year however, as Shattered mercilessly details, was one of the great political train wrecks of all time. By 2016, when her second effort really began, the idea that it was Hillary’s turn — this time for sure — was burned so deeply into the minds of the candidate herself and her supporters that neither Hillary or any of her vast and powerful campaign team could accommodate any indications, at any time, that she might be seriously in trouble. To them, Bernie Sanders was just a distraction, Donald Trump a loudmouth moron with no staying power at all — there was no way either of them could trouble her billion- dollarplus, inevitable, unstoppable push to the White House.
The world knows now, of course, that there was a way, many ways in fact, and most of them supplied by the flaws, errors, misguidance and hubris of Hillary’s own campaign. Shattered offers only one conclusion: Donald Trump didn’t beat Hillary. Hillary beat Hillary. Lady Bracknell’s judgment rules. It was carelessness, carelessness fostered by the pure hubris of a cloistered mind, that brought her down.
Has that lesson been learned? Hardly. It is one of the delights of the committedly progressive mind that it can never contemplate the notion of its own fallibility. Ask Hillary why she lost and the response is a list of various and sometimes contradictory excuses longer than the cloying “thank- yous” on Oscar night. The Clinton team’s explanation for the horror of the Trump victory is that the American people — aided by James Comey and the Russians and the damn emails and the pernicious misogyny of the American electorate — simply made a mistake.
After two such drubbings, the normal politician would call it a day. Leave the stage to the victor, pen the dull memoirs, and enjoy the serenity of a politics- free retirement. Not this candidate. Hillary has “come out of the woods” and announced just this week that she is forming a new fundraising PAC and “will soon launch a political organization aimed at funding ‘ resistance’ groups that are standing up to President Donald Trump.” I’m not sure what is stranger in this move: The idea that Hillary Clinton needs to extend one of the longest political careers of the modern era; or that — on the analogy of France during the Second World War — America is in need of a resistance, and that she is the “La Pasionaria” to lead it.
Is there never a time to quit? Never a time, having twice been given the opportunity to run for the presidency, simply to say “goodbye to all that”?
Apparently not. The same insularity of mind that accounts for both her losses is at work: America needs Hillary whether America knows it or not. Nor is this a singular or unique experience. For within a day or two of Hillary’s eerie pledge to fight on, Barack Obama — also eerily — taped a campaign video for the run- off election in ... France! He is, no surprise, backing Emmanuel Macron.
The video is not much, the usual soup of puerile clichés ( Macron is “appealing to peoples’ hopes, not fears” — a formulation not just dead but severely decomposed). It ends with a bizarre chant — a Charles de Gaulle moment from an American ex- president — of “Vive la France!” The Republic will live on. If the Russians did “interfere” in the American elections, at least Putin didn’t cut campaign commercials from the Kremlin or stump for Trump in Wisconsin.
But then again, the candidate who once did a campaign stop, during his own presidential run, in Berlin — surely a long way from New Hampshire — might feel now, free of the nuisance of being tied down to the Oval Office, that there are other countries, other elections, athirst for his wisdom and presence.
For some politics is not a calling or a career; it is an obsession. A prime component of that obsession is that regardless of defeat ( Hillary) or completion of term (Obama), their country or the world still has need of them. The modesty of retirement from the public eye, the courtesy of stepping aside for the duly elected victor, or leaving other countries to their own political business, are moves that do not occur to them. Politics owns them.
It’s not likely two of the world’s most famous politicos would deign to take up the example of a leader from a less rambunctious country, a leader who — having weathered the joys and storms of office — once defeated, leaves the world of politics to turn as it will without him. Stephen Harper is not flitting about Canada dropping advice on leadership campaigns, excoriating premiers he doesn’t agree with, or for that matter, commandeering the Eiffel Tower to do a campaign video for the benefit of the French electorate.
Instead, having had his time, he observes a decent decorum, preserves the dignity of the office he held by a modest and becoming reticence to further engage in the partisan arena. And, contra Obama and Hillary, leaves his own and the other countries of the world unmolested by the thought that they cannot struggle on without him. Harper, in this respect, is a model.