Why I haven’t thought much about the prospects of a Hillary Clinton Presidency. Answer: Because she lost the Primary fight.
A list of the most powerful First Ladies in American history, in order.
#1:Â Edith Wilson
#2:Â Eleanor Roosevelt
#3:Â Nancy Reagan
#4:Â Hillary Clinton
I would not know how to figure #5 onward. I stick this up because I think this configuration is entirely defendable, and because it battles against Hillary Clinton supporters’ stated belief that she somehow revolutionized and was exemplier in her role as first lady. Understand, I do think her tenure as Fourth Most Powerful First Lady in American History is worth something by way of arguing experience. While it is more than some cynics I see as noting that she “slept in the Oval Office for eight years”, it still just only goes so far.
My basic problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign at this point is that it is over. She lost. There is no getting around the simple facts that Obama is going to end the primary process with more votes and with more delegates than Hillary Clinton, and that the super-delegates at large are less inclined to go against that flow than the super-delegates not at large.
I do find it interesting how Hillary Clinton supporters argure against this. The Caucuses are undemocratic and favor white collar professionals and students at the expense of the working class blue collar supporters. Maybe, but there is nothing intrinsically organic in this formulation — it also should favor older, more reliable voters at the expense of younger, less reliable voters.
The matter of Florida and Michigan are the more amusing subjects. These states serve as the great tragedy of the 2008 primary campaign. The problem is that the parties were trying to make sense out of an unordered process, and these states’ leaders tried to wreck that ordering attempt. This results in two faulty elections, which Hillary Clinton first wanted to make her own. The governor of Michigan was particularly annoyingly arrogant with a sense of entitelement at the time of the Michigan primary, insisting that something was intrinsically was special about her state such that it deserved the special attention in wrecking the primary schedule attempt — it was a sense of entitlement for her state, full of “Salt of the Earth” citizens, and a sense of entitlement on behalf of her favored candidate — the only front-running candidate who did not bother to get her name off the ballot. As for Florida, I liked the idea of keeping the vote total of the faulty election, and halving the delegates, basically because my sense of the state is that a legitimate election would have resulted in roughly half the margin of victory for Hillary Clinton.
As for that list, I think I’ll leave that up in the air so that I can come back to it and kick out another blog post one of these days in explaining why Edith, Eleanor, and Nancy were more powerful First Ladies than Hillary.