How Not To Get The Best Possible Democratic Candidate For The White House!

[bullwinkle428]

76. Charlie Pierce wrote a beautiful piece on "Inevitability" this morning.

"INDIANOLA, Iowa -- It was a bright day in the fields, a day for swooping swallows and the fluttering of Monarch butterflies, and a blue sky that seemed to have started in Antarctica and worked its way north to this place, this farm, where the first public absurdity of the 2016 presidential campaign was taking place. It was Tom Harkin's last annual Steak Fry, one of those lost-in-time political goat-ropings that remain charming because so many of our political rituals are not any more. It was not the event itself that was absurd. In fact, it was a perfectly glorious way to spend a perfectly glorious Sunday with what appeared to be every Democrat in the state of Iowa. Still, there was an awful lot of the event that could lead you to assess the whole thing as an extended series of punchlines. First of all, it was a political event, with politicians, that was taking place in the National Balloon Field -- Yes, we have one. This is a great country. -- and, therefore, you could pick among approximately 997 jokes about hot air. The press was housed for filing purposes in a tin structure that appeared to be a repurposed manure shed. (Go crazy with that, if you must.) But it was in the last of the three obvious punchlines that we find the first true absurdity of the next presidential election. There were more than a hundred reporters, camera-people, a human centipede of boom microphones waiting by a chain link fence, waiting for Hillary Clinton to grill a steak. Yes, Hillary Clinton and dead meat. The conventional wisdom at the moment is that the Democratic presidential field for 2016 is pretty much the same thing.

It was a curiously joyful, if somewhat placid, affair in a country that seems to be sliding, inevitably, towards war with our current Hitlers du jour in the Levant. The national blood is up again, and, because nobody learns anything ever any more, the hard-won skepticism that the United States can do anything about a part of the world where the inhabitants insist on slaughtering each other, except, of course, make everything even worse than it was before, is being abandoned almost by the day. We once again are hearing talk about arming the local "moderates," as though anyone can truly still be moderate after you give them a couple of Stingers and an RPG launcher. We once again are hearing talk about coalition partners and multilateral governments in places where the basic idea of a coalition is getting everybody you hate together in order to hate someone else, and the basic idea of a multilateral government is a Cabinet composed of people who are all packing different sidearms. And the only thing practically everyone agrees on is that it is United States soldiers who are going to be the ones doing the fighting and the dying. The ISIS barbarians believe it because they want to kill them. Some of our staunchest "allies" believe it because they don't want ISIS to kill them. While everyone was lining up for steak and potato salad, and free beer and lemonade, the usual suspects were all over the Sunday shows, and the rhetoric seemed to be sliding inevitably toward American forces on the ground, somewhere, in that part of the world.

Hillary Clinton came to Indianola. She was smart and coy. Her husband, almost a rail now in his checkered shirt, worked the fenceline right behind her, and that's going to be the most fascinating part of her inevitable run. In 2008, it is said, Bill Clinton was a loose cannon rolling across the deck of her sinking campaign, spouting off, hogging the spotlight, and making the whole Clinton team look musty and fusty and old compared to the dynamic new stylings of the Obama team. But the fact remains that he is still the greatest natural retail politician of our time, and she is, well, not. As they walked along the fenceline, fielding questions, and getting hugged by Tom Harkin, you could see the difference, and the basic dynamic of how she is going to run for president with him around. She was perfectly pleasant, crisp and businesslike. He was, once again, the man who came to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You would have needed the Jaws of Life to pry him away from the people he'd found to talk to. She spent a lot of time not announcing her candidacy. He talked about how he thought Mark Pryor was going to hang onto the Senate seat in Arkansas, citing demographic numbers in a clickety-clack fashion, while joking about having to eat a veggie burger. "He's done great, ever since he had to change his diet," Ms. Clinton said. "I, on the other hand, am still a meat-eater. I'm going to go enjoy some of that beef now." And she left. He stayed.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/One_Day_In_Iowa