It’s enough to make you feel sorry for Hillary Clinton. Well, almost.
Her presidential campaign of celebrity and inevitability got off to a rocky start, mostly through her own mistakes, as when she claimed they were “dead broke” when she and Bubba left the White House.
But her gaffes were mere speed bumps compared to the real threat forming now.
Massachusetts firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren emerges from Washington’s budget clash as the undisputed champion of the rising left, and will almost certainly challenge Clinton for the 2016 nomination.
The polls say it’s Hillary’s turn, but I’m starting to believe 2016 could be 2008 all over again, with Warren taking the nomination from her the way Barack Obama did.
As Mark Twain said, “History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” So it is with the political dynamic, then and now.
Clinton acted entitled, and Obama offered a charismatic alternative. She represented the tired past, he a fresh future.
A possible Warren sequel to that historic upset has been taking shape for months, but it has now crystallized. The first-term senator’s rallying cry against what she called “a giveaway to the most powerful banks” almost scuttled the budget bill in the House before bipartisan support allowed her to have it both ways.
She comes out of the wreckage as the standard-bearer of progressive populism without being blamed for shutting down the government. Her GOP doppelgänger, Ted Cruz, should have been so lucky.
He was accused of taking the American people hostage by Warren, Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid during last year’s shutdown.
But now that one of their own is manning the barricades, many Democrats are energized by rigid opposition to compromise. Even Pelosi cheered Warren bombshells you can’t imagine Clinton ever saying.
“A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street,” Warren said of the bill’s rollback of a Dodd-Frank provision. “It is time for all of us to stand up and fight.”
The contrast with Clinton isn’t limited to rhetoric and style. The former first lady, senator and secretary of state has, with her husband, long been cozy with Wall Street and took a reported $400,000 in speaking fees from the left’s antichrist, Goldman Sachs.
Until now, that record largely worked in her favor. It has helped to define her as more mature and less likely to chase ideological rainbows — the kind of person who believes in compromise.
Suddenly, that is no longer an advantage. Members of her party’s anti-bank, anti-capitalist wing have found somebody to stir them as she never did. And Warren erases Clinton’s gender advantage.
Most telling, the left’s intensity is growing since the GOP midterm rout. Instead of being chastised, the populist wing absurdly claims that Democrats have been too willing to compromise. There is no way to see that scorn as good for Clinton.
Obama, too, is being treated like last week’s fish, with most House Democrats rejecting his plea to vote for the $1.1 trillion spending bill. That weakens him in his own party, even as Republicans will control Congress for the remainder of his term.
Still, the president remains a potent force, especially among black voters, and his support will likely determine the 2016 nominee. The betting so far is that he will back Clinton, but last week injects a dose of doubt about that.
Going back to the bitter battle of 2008, they’ve never liked each other, and Clinton used her book to try to distance herself from Obama on foreign policy. Moreover, a number of his political operatives are signing on with Warren, which may be a revealing indicator of Obama’s private sentiments.
Clinton, of course, is given to conspiracy theories and a sense of paranoia, but now there is real reason to worry. She has genuine enemies, and their power and numbers are growing.
Grab some popcorn. This could be fun.
Stirring up the haters
For those of us who survived the lawless mayhem of New York in the 1970s and ’80s, troubling signs of the bad old days keep popping up. The latest is a rap video urging black people to kill white cops.
Here’s the scariest part: It comes from The Bronx Defenders, a legal-aid-type group paid
$107 million by the city over the last seven years to represent poor defendants, The Post reports.
The video shows black men holding guns to cops’ heads while lyrics demand that “a cop got to get killed.”
A statement from the organization suggested it knew about the video and the lyrics, but claimed it didn’t know of the police threats. That’s a curious parsing and certainly no claim of complete innocence.
Mayor de Blasio has to accept responsibility for creating this climate. His sweeping denunciations of the NYPD as a bunch of racist brutes gives some sickos all the license they need to shed blue blood.
The mayor must tone down his act before it’s too late. His job is to keep all New Yorkers safe, and it’s time he started doing that instead of behaving like a racial agitator.
One Al Sharpton is enough.
Crooked pols owe us, Andy!
Gov. Cuomo has it backwards in discussing a possible pay raise with state legislators. Given the persistent Albany culture of “all you can steal,” lawmakers ought to pay to keep their jobs instead of being paid.
Taxpayers would get a windfall, and the arrangement would have the added benefit of making honest people of corrupt state officials.
Do I hear an opening bid?
Citi Bike spin doc
Comptroller Scott Stringer uses an audit of Citi Bike to worry about the danger to riders from bikes that aren’t properly maintained. Better he worry about the danger to 8 million New Yorkers from reckless bikers.
Movie big ‘revs’ up the hypocrisy
White power! Black power! Hypocrisy! Those could be on a poster for a Sony movie, but they actually describe the squeeze facing company co-chair Amy Pascal.
After e-mails surfaced showing her making racial jokes about President Obama’s taste in movies, Pascal did what any groveling liberal would do — she turned to Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton for absolution.
Jackson promised a meeting “to discuss a healing process,” Pascal said Friday. She called Sharpton “very warm” and said they would meet, too.
That’s mighty big of them, but Pascal might want to take her check book to the meetings. “Healing” with the good reverends doesn’t come cheap. It’s part of their business model.
The episode is a true train wreck, with Pascal mocking the president with producer Scott Rudin even as she was headed to an Obama fund-raiser.
The hypocrisy is about par among a Hollywood elite that preaches piety to the masses while expressing its prejudice in secret.
In her apology, Pascal said her crude comments don’t “reflect who I am.” That would be true if this were a movie, but it’s not. It’s who she is.