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[WillyT]

No, I’m not “ready for Hillary” — but here’s why resistance is futile
Left media goes on the attack and Warren boosters keep hoping -- but battling Hillary is a pointless distraction
ANDREW O'HEHIR - Salon
SATURDAY, NOV 15, 2014 09:00 AM PST

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Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends: the spectacle of the American left (I could, and perhaps should, use scare quotes around that term) chewing on its own entrails in anguish and frustration. With the misery of the midterm elections out of the way, and their thoroughly unsurprising revelation that people who nominally support the Democratic Party don’t actually care enough to vote, we can move on to bigger things. Specifically, to the Big Kahuna of American politics, the specter that’s been haunting the political arena from just offstage for months if not years, like a half-inflated cartoon blimp from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. I refer, of course, to Hillary Clinton, who will provide endless fodder for deep-thinking punditry and 24/7 programming for the Liberal Despair Network from now through the 2016 Iowa caucuses and beyond. If you thought you were sick of her already, just wait.

I plead guilty as charged, of course. Clinton is so hated both on the right and on the left, yet so overwhelmingly likely to be our next president, that she’s like a black hole that sucks up all political energy, a bright flame that draws in all the hapless moths. I wrote a column a few months ago comparing her to Ronald Reagan, which I certainly meant to be provocative but was far too arch in execution. I forgot or didn’t know the first rule of punditry, which is to make your premise really obvious and beat the reader over the head with it repeatedly. I still get occasional mails from horrified liberals telling me that Clinton is the exact opposite of Reagan, or horrified conservatives saying “LOL u wish libtard.” So here’s the Cliff’s Note version: The comparison was not meant to be flattering to either of them, but the point was that they both functioned as supercharged political symbols, meant to mobilize specific voter demographics far beyond their normal level of participation. (White men and white women, respectively.)

That demographic superpower made Reagan impossible to defeat, and may do the same for Clinton. Here’s my premise this time: Clinton’s impending presidential campaign is causing immense anguish on the left (which I share), but the 2016 battle is quite simply not worth fighting, not by Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or anybody else. I think we have to consider that potent symbolic dimension when we face the left’s combination of Hillary-mania and Hillary-phobia, which does not entirely correspond to the measurable dimensions of Hillary Clinton as a politician, policymaker and public figure. There just isn’t much anyone can say about her on those latter fronts that hasn’t been said many times before. That problem bedevils Doug Henwood’s thorough and even cautious “Stop Hillary!” cover story in the November issue of Harper’s (unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall), along with almost everything else that gets written about the former first lady, former secretary of state and presumptive presidential front-runner.

Henwood’s article was the longest and most articulate entry in a stop-Clinton litany that has also included pieces in the Nation, In These Times and the New Republic over the last year or so. This week brought us a gossipy summary in Politico, loaded with unfounded surmises and insiderish jargon, which argues that the “liberal media” is desperately trying to gin up an anti-Clinton crusade and provoke someone into running against her from the left: Sanders or Warren or outgoing Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley or, what the hell, outgoing Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (who isn’t a left-winger by anyone’s definition). This article is both vastly dumber than the Harper’s essay and, curiously, much more on point. Hillary Clinton’s actual positions are not really in doubt, and as Henwood rigorously details, anybody who fails to grasp that she’s a hawk on both economics and foreign policy, a pawn of Wall Street, a creature of the neoliberal “Washington consensus” and a loyal defender of the deep state is living inside a willed delusion.

No, the focus of current left-wing obsession is not so much Hillary herself as the Hillary conundrum...

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More: http://www.salon.com/2014/11/15/no_im_not_ready_for_hillary_but_heres_why_resistance_is_futile/