Hillary Clinton plots her comeback
Imissed the Bill and Hillary conversation tour when it hit Toronto due to prior commitments. Socks, even the least flamboyant, do not sort themselves. Press accounts tell me it was less than the crowd-swollen highenergy jamboree it was expected to be.
Torontonians, who have previously exhibited a surprisingly rich appetite for Bill or Hillary Clinton when they showed up solo, stayed away in busloads when offered the Two-On-A-Plate Special at the Scotiabank Arena last month. Even a desperate last minute dive in the ticket price — they were going for a three-chicken-strips-at-Popeye’s six bucks — failed to populate the venue, and out of 19,000 seats, only about 3,000 suffered human contact for a close view of Bill and Hillary having in public what perhaps happens less often when they are at home: a conversation.
A puzzle that. When the Arkansas Elvis first ran for president, he teased Americans that if they elected him they would get Hillary as a bonus. “Buy Bill, get Hillary for free.” The line was more Walmart than Hallmark, but back then it had a naive charm which time, prodigious self-promotion, and Bill’s personal Tallahatchie bridge, Monica Lewinsky, has since utterly scattered.
Hillary, however, never yields. That’s her brand. Resist. If chatting with Bill doesn’t command the cameras, she has other ways of agitating the paparazzi and seizing the columns of the Daily Mail.
The most recent was indubitably the most peculiar. Hillary was one of a great congeries of celebrity types, TV microbes and failed statespersons that lent their dubious lustre and creaky dignity to an explosion of exhibitionist excess put on in Mumbai by plutocrat Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man (net worth: US$43 billion).
He is the subcontinent’s meld of Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett, owns the world’s tallest and most expensive house (27 storeys high, worth US$1.2 billion) with 600 staff (those socks don’t sort themselves), three helipads (one probably just for indoor transport) and living space of a mere 37,000 square gold and silk ornamented feet.
Naturally it has a secret panic floor to which Mr. Ambani flees whenever anyone brings up the subject of good taste.
Last week he put on what threatens to be the most famous wedding since the Incarnation and the wine-tasting ceremony at Cannae, a US$100 million shindig for his daughter’s nuptials to the son of another, slightly more impoverished plutocrat (net worth: a meagre US$10 billion).
As every hundred-million-dollar walk down the gilded aisle needs a sprinkle of glitz, he hired Beyoncé and her vibrant booty for a reported US$7 million dollars to wobble and sing for 45 minutes. And to put the crown of super-exclusivity on the event, he also invited the first woman ever to attempt to win the American presidency for a major political party twice, and fail on each occasion, the aforementioned Hillary Clinton. John Kerry — I find this a surprise — was also exhumed for the event.
The Clintons and the Ambanis are not family friends, but the great sponges of the Clinton Foundation have benefited from some watering from the Ambanis — who, over the years, made quite sizable donations. So it may be safe to infer Hillary wasn’t there so much for the “I dos” as to signal thanks for the “you dids.” Highlight of Mrs. Clinton’s stay was her (and John Kerry — “the horror, the horror”) dancing to the strains of Bollywood. It reminded many of our own Mr. Trudeau’s bhangra blitz. On style, he beats Hillary by leagues. She, on the other hand, conveyed no failed assassins to her gig.
What can all this mean? It means that the indomitable Hillary is not willing, even as her Democratic compeers urgently request, to retire from the public stage. And much more to the point, that the thought of a third leap for the gold ring of American politics is alive and receiving nourishment within the innermost alcoves of Hillaryland. “Yes, She Can” is the message carefully being unwrapped.
It is a prospect receiving more and more attention. From no less than Mark Penn, pollster and chief adviser to both Clintons for decades, came this recent alert from a Wall Street Journal column:
“Claims of a Russian conspiracy and the unfairness of the Electoral College shielded Mrs. Clinton from ever truly conceding she had lost. She was robbed, she told herself, yet again. But after two years of brooding — including at book length — Mrs. Clinton has come unbound. She will not allow this humiliating loss at the hands of an amateur to end the story of her career.”
It’s Quondam et Futurus Hillary. She will either stage — to cite the cliché of choice — the greatest comeback since Lazarus, or join history with the bombinating evangelist, three-time presidential hopeful and loser, William Jennings Bryant. Poor Bryant’s fame now rests on his embarrassing encounter with Clarence Darrow in the Scopes “monkey” trial, and the most overwrought (and blasphemous) line in the history of American political oratory — to wit: “I shall not press upon the brow of labour this crown of thorns: I will not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”
Hobnobbing with the Gatsbys of Mumbai and validating the excesses of the top one per cent of the fully deplorable one-per-centers will fade, and assuming her health allows it, there is nothing implausible about a third run.
Perhaps it is just how delicious a Hillary-Trump rematch would be that encourages these thoughts. But hope almost by definition hangs from a slender branch, and this one is far less fantastic than many others that have blossomed into reality. Trump as president, for example.