There she finally was, up on the stage, all in white. Just like Nurse Ratched. And like Nurse Ratched she was there to calmly and logically explain to all of us how a very bad boy had broken too many rules. Randall Patrick McTrumpy, Nurse Hillary told us, could no longer be allowed to continue on his mission to turn America into a cuckoo’s nest. So she asked America to step up and serve as her orderlies, to straight-jacket McTrumpy and wrestle him to the nearest lobotomy table.
But as Hillary Clinton made history Thursday night in Philadelphia — she is now officially the first major-party female candidate for president to bore a nation into coma — she forgot that no one roots for Nurse Ratched. Trump is the former star of the No. 1 reality-show on TV; Hillary was like a PBS pledge drive.
Mrs. Clinton didn’t just muff her acceptance speech the way her husband face-planted in his legendarily dull 1988 nomination speech in Atlanta. It was like she was filibustering her own candidacy. After America spent half a week wondering whether Donald Trump was secretly working for Vladimir Putin, Hillary made it equally plausible that she was secretly working for Karl Rove. Where Trump delivered red meat with a steak knife sticking out of it, Clinton served us steamed rutabagas with a plastic spork and a gentle but firm warning not to use too much salt because sodium might be bad for you.
The hacks say that politics means campaigning in poetry but governing in prose. Hillary can’t even campaign in prose. She campaigns in hectoring nullity, in regulese. She campaigns like pages 11,247-12,301 of the Federal Register. One commentator on NBC, who wasn’t even trying to be mean, helplessly compared her speech to Walter Mondale’s self-immolating address in 1984 in San Francisco.
At no point did Clinton address her huge disapproval rating, her history of mendacious acts, her tongue-lashing earlier this month by the director of the FBI. Instead the speech toggled from hopeful sentiments (delivered with an incongruous angry scowl) to attempts to claim victim status because her mother apparently used to use coupons to buy food (back in olden days before her daughter and son in law made $221 million peddling access to their majesties) to Trump-punching that was competent but hardly lethal.
After America spent half a week wondering whether Donald Trump was secretly working for Vladimir Putin, Hillary made it equally plausible that she was secretly working for Karl Rove.
When she promised every middle-class family in America free college tuition, it somehow sounded like a threat. She claimed, credibly, to be a master of legislative details that don’t unduly burden the imagination of The Donald, but she came across as the uptight girl in the perfect twinset, sitting up straight in the front row of Trigonometry waving an overeager fan in the teacher’s face while everyone whispers “Why do we need trigonometry” and wonders what’ll happen when the class jock snoozing in the back row, the one in the baseball jacket with “Don” written in cursive across it, finally wakes up.
Is Hillary Clinton more qualified than Donald Trump to be president? Is the head of pediatrics at Columbia-Presbyterian more qualified to examine your sick child than your bus driver? Of course she is. But if getting elected president were about presenting the better résumé, John McCain would have clobbered Barack Obama. Becoming president is about capturing our imagination. Hillary may deserve it, but that doesn’t mean we deserve her. The president is the person who appears in your family room more than anyone else outside your family.
Can the republic endure four years of her every night? Trump is often compared to Howard Beale, the mad prophet of the airwaves in “Network,” but it’s Hillary who could actually make us not only stick our heads out the windows but toss our TVs while doing so. Ten minutes of any Hillary speech and it’ll be, “We’re bored as hell, and we’re not gonna take it anymore!”
Pre-Hillary, the week had gone brilliantly for Democrats. Michelle Obama, Joe Biden and President Obama were excellent, but mainly they just made us want to be with them, not her. If any one of the three went up against Trump in November, they’d demolish him.
Team Hillary made the mistake of allowing the anticipation level to rise too high, and immediately after she started speaking the energy level in the room began to drop. It was as though we were all sitting through that dreadful first-time showing of “The Phantom Menace” again, asking ourselves: It can’t be this bad, can it?
Hillary will make history either way in November. Either she completes her 16-year mission to return to the Oval Office or she goes in the books as the biggest choke artist ever to grace the American arena.