The joke writes itself. How desperate are Democrats these days? So desperate that Hillary Clinton is being seriously mentioned as a possibility for president in 2024.
Only it’s not a laugh line. Honestly. It’s one of those bits of news that, when you first hear it, makes you smile, like ha, that’s very funny. But then your smile turns upside down as you realize, my gosh, you’re not kidding, are you? Well, if the highly esteemed Wall Street Journal can run an op-ed written by actual honest-to-goodness Democrats, as opposed to wishful thinking Republicans, entitled "Hillary Clinton’s 2024 Election Comeback," well then, we might suppose the unthinkable has somehow become thinkable.
Kamala Harris and Joe Biden (Photo by Ken Cedeno-Pool/Getty Images)
That’s how poorly Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are doing. That’s how distraught their party has thus become. That’s how thin the Democrats’ bench is after years of Obama-first policies that glorified the 44th president while the party collapsed around him, losing over 1,000 legislative seats across the nation. That’s how many potential presidential candidates eliminated themselves from serious future consideration during the shameful and embarrassing Democratic primary season of 2020. Democrats know the likes of Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and the octogenarian socialist Bernie Sanders will never be president – nor obviously will one-time leftist heartthrob turned disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. Even the one high-profile survivor of the primaries whose reputation survived intact, Pete Buttigieg, is almost impossible to envision as commander-in-chief.
And so, it has come to this. The woman who suffered arguably the most shocking, humiliating defeat in American political history is actually back in the discussion years later because, well, who else is there? Nobody really, unless you want to count a couple of highly controversial governors, California’s Gavin Newsom or Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, from out of left field. The woman whose signature was labeling tens of millions of voters a “basket of deplorables,” arguably the most whopping unforced error in American electoral history, has now been encouraged to engage in heavy duty fantasizing, bringing back to life a dream that almost certainly died through all the agonizing free time she never expected to have after November 8, 2016.
Authors of the WSJ piece, longtime political consultant Doug Schoen (his clients included Bill Clinton) and former New York City Council and Manhattan Borough President Andrew Stein, are the first professional Democrats to express publicly the frustration which must be brewing privately in the hearts of Democrats across the land. And we know the failure of this administration has certainly been the subject of murmurs and whispers in party ranks all over the nation’s capital and beyond. The party power brokers made a deal with the proverbial devil in shoving the oldest president in American history across the high wire with only a weak shadow of a vice president as a safety net. And now they are left with an unholy mess. They have created what the authors describe as a “perfect storm in the Democratic Party making a once-unfathomable scenario plausible.”
Hillary herself has somewhat pointedly refused to rule out another run at the ultimate prize, and recently went on record at MSNBC criticizing the party’s hard left turn: “I think that it is a time for some careful thinking about what wins elections, and not just in deep-blue districts where a Democrat and a liberal Democrat, or so-called progressive Democrat, is going to win.” Adding to the speculation were recent comments by Hillary’s husband, who knows a thing or two about presidential politics. He may have been testing the waters when he told People Magazine that Hillary is “the most qualified person to run for office in my lifetime, including me” and proclaimed that the nation’s failure to elect her in 2016 was “one of the most profound mistakes we ever made.”
As the Trump team gears up for a likely run at recapturing the Oval Office, one can engage in delicious speculation about their reaction to the prospect of beating Mrs. Clinton a second time. Is Hillary really, truly entertaining the idea of running again? Well, at minimum, she does not look or sound like someone disengaged from politics or anxious to squash the growing rumors. We could employ a trio of useful cliches to summarize how emblematic this is of the dire straits in which Democrats find themselves when that name – which, after 2016, must not be uttered in Democratic circles – is now once again mentioned as the possible party standard bearer in 2024. Their chickens have come home to roost, it’s time to pay the piper, and the cupboards are bare.
~ Read more from Tim Donner.
