A divided Democratic Party, united only in a quest to defeat President Trump this year, is stretched to breaking over fault lines of young and old, liberal and moderate, persuaders and mobilizers, stabilizers and revolutionaries. About the last thing they need now is another Hillary Clinton revival tour -- but here it comes. As the first votes in the nominating contest are set to be cast in just days, and barring a sweep by former Vice President Joe Biden, a protracted contest between the progressive and centrist candidates could drag out through February, to Super Tuesday, March 3, and even late into that month as delegates potentially pile up for several candidates. So if the party’s in Week 5 of that meltdown, March 6 is quite a time for Clinton’s four-hour docu-series about her life to debut on Hulu. She will be seeking press attention upon its airing, of course, but has already upset the establishment by attacking He Who Must Not Be Named. In the film she says of Sen. Bernie Sanders: “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” She then hedged when asked by the Hollywood Reporter whether she would endorse Sanders as the nominee should he prevail. A fierce reaction ensued on Twitter, with outraged voices from ObamaWorld countered by HillaryLand defenders, and it ended with Clinton having to tweet that yes, of course she would support the nominee, even if it’s the democratic socialist who challenged her four years ago. That is not exactly how it sounded in the Reporter interview. When asked if she will support a Sanders candidacy in the general election, she said: “I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it.” For a while after the 2016 election and the inauguration, there were long breaks -- mercifully -- when we didn’t hear from Clinton. She was grieving, raging, whatever those five stages of electoral defeat are that one must journey through. But she’s healed and liberated and energized now, downright perky in fact, and is eager to rejoin the community of newsmakers. No matter that many Democrats aren’t over their grief, and still blame her for Trump, she’s out of her shell and truly enjoying it. The former secretary of state has been book-touring with her daughter for months (they collaborated on “The Book of Gutsy Women,” which was published last fall). A glance at StubHub shows the speaking tour she and former President Bill Clinton did last winter practically merged with the next set of appearances with Chelsea. And her cathartic Bernie-bashing began in a December Howard Stern interview that lasted several hours where she also dished on Trump, her pained Inauguration Day experience and so on and so on. The formerly clammed-up Clinton provides an intimate look at her life in the documentary, sharing the ugly times -- Monica Lewinsky, etc. -- along with the good. It is her project, one she sought just months after her defeat to make use of the extensive documentation from her 2016 campaign, to share her story and her glory. The filmmakers even tried tracking down Republican validators but couldn’t find one participant, and they admit former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told them directly he would rather “stick needles” in his eye. All these years and crushing defeats later, Clinton’s blindness is alive and well. While Democrats know Clinton’s thirst for relevance renders Trump and his voters euphoric, she remains entirely unaware. And given her mockery of Trump’s emotionally desperate tweets, it’s ironic that the former senator and first lady has also stooped to social media neediness – as when, on Jan. 8, with the nation panicked because Trump had taken us to the brink of war with Iran, she tweeted a GIF of herself under the hashtag #ivotedforHillaryClinton. This is what Democrats dread as the campaign season intensifies and she seeks more opportunities to make news. With her 2016 battle scars Clinton feels uniquely positioned as the expert on anything related to the election of 2020 and she is prepared to indulge herself. She told the Hollywood Reporter that she has warned all the candidates: “Whoever gets the nomination, you've got to deal with the structural challenges that the Republicans and their allies have put in your way. So, that means you've got to deal with voter suppression, because they'll steal votes or they'll prevent votes from happening. They're now trying to purge voters so that they can try to limit the electorate. You've got to deal with the theft of your personal information, particularly your emails. I say to them, ‘If your emails haven't been stolen yet, they will be.’ ” But of all topics, Clinton is most fond of the double standard she believes she endured and that female candidates in the 2020 race are now subjected to. It’s not hard to tell, given the time spent on this topic in the film as well, that Clinton sees this as her unique expertise, a subject on which she can enlighten or inspire. She wants us to know she has met with the women candidates in the race and told them they won’t be treated fairly and “don't let it knock you off your stride.” In the Reporter interview, Clinton said of the women who ran in 2018, “I supported them. They contacted me, they told me that volunteering for me or my election motivated them to run.” And while that may be true, no Democrats had Hillary or Bill Clinton campaign for them in those midterms. Clinton, who said that “thankfully I still have a voice and a following,” clearly feels needed, and says many people ask her to run for president “every day.” So while she won’t run she is geared up to stay in the fight. “Does it get discouraging? Do you feel like you want to pull the covers over your head? Yes. But it's just not how I'm made, and it's not what I think this country that I love and I've tried to serve should stand for,” she told the interviewer. “So, I get back in the fray.” At the premiere of “Hillary” at the Sundance Film Festival last weekend, Hillary made sure to make news on Facebook, likening the platform to a foreign power and calling Mark Zuckerberg’s policy of permitting lies in political ads “Trumpian,” and “authoritarian.” Zuckerberg, Clinton said, has been persuaded “that it’s to his and Facebook’s advantage not to cross Trump. That’s what I believe. And it just gives me a pit in my stomach.” Clinton concluded, which she is likely to repeat in the future, that she believes Facebook is “not just going to reelect Trump, but intend[s] to reelect Trump.” She is not the only Democrat who believes this, but as tensions grow, along with the debate over the dominance of digital advertising in the campaign, it isn’t likely to be an issue Democrats want Clinton to lead on. Unfortunately, no one quite knows how to stop her, and she and her husband apparently haven’t absorbed just how far out of the establishment power circle they actually are. Democrats are likely hoping Clinton will contain her urges to compare herself with the nominee they anoint in July, and refrain from such comments until at least after November. As they take on a stronger Trump than she did, they would like 2020 to be as free of the stench of the 2016 defeat as possible. Clinton may not allow it.Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

"Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician." So says Hillary Clinton of her former Senate colleague and 2016 rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie Sanders. Her assessment of Sanders' populist-socialist agenda? "It's all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it." Does that assessment still hold with Sanders now running strong in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, and having emerged, according to The New York Times, as "the dominant liberal force in the 2020 race"? "Yes, it does," said Clinton, who left open the possibility she might not support Sanders if he became the nominee. In her interview with The Hollywood Reporter to promote a documentary that premieres Saturday at the Sundance Film Festival, Clinton also tore into Bernie's backers. "It is not only him. It's the culture around him. It's his leadership team. It's his prominent supporters. It's his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women," said Clinton. "It should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture -- not only permitted [he] seems to be very much supporting it." From her own words, Clinton regards Sanders as a nasty man running a misogynistic campaign and a political phony whose achievements are nonexistent and who lacks the temperament to be president. As Clinton describes Sanders, he seems to fit nicely into her Trumpian "basket of deplorables." Reflecting the significance of Clinton's attack, The New York Times put it on Page 1. This comes one week after Elizabeth Warren, at the end of the last debate, confronted Sanders, who had denied ever telling her a woman could not win the presidency. "I think you just called me a liar on national TV," said Warren, twice. Sanders assuredly had. He then accused Warren of lying. This is "a part of a pattern," says Clinton, noting that Sanders said in 2016 that she was not qualified to be president. What is Hillary up to? She is "hellbent on stopping Sanders," says Obama strategist David Axelrod. The bad blood between Bernie and two leading women in the Democratic Party calls to mind the battle between Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater, which did not end well for the Republican Party in 1964. While the eventual GOP nominee, Goldwater, lost in a 44-state landslide to Lyndon Johnson, the liberal Republican establishment that Rockefeller led would never again be able to nominate one of its own. It is difficult to see how this acrimony inside the Democratic Party -- over the character, record, ideology and alleged sexism of Sen. Bernie Sanders -- ends well for the Democrats. Already, Bernie's backers believe the DNC "rigged" the nomination in 2016 by feigning neutrality while secretly aiding Clinton. If Sanders now fails in the first primaries and loses his last chance for the Democratic nomination because of the Clinton-Warren's attacks, it is difficult to see how Bernie's backers enthusiastically support Warren. As for Bernie backing Biden, the raison d'etre of the liberal-radical wing of the party to whom Sanders is a hero is that the Democratic establishment consistently sells out progressive values. Sanders' crowd consists of true believers, a trademark of whom is militancy. Such folks often prefer defeat behind a principled leader to victory for a corporatist Democrat they regard as the enemy within. Assume Bernie defeats Warren in Iowa, bests Biden in New Hampshire, and then goes on to win the nomination. Would women, a majority of whom vote Democratic, and who are indispensable to party victory, surge to the polls to install a president whom Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren describe as a sexist who ruined their own presidential hopes? Would Democratic women come out to vote for a candidate who was responsible, in two successive presidential elections, for keeping the glass ceiling firmly intact over the heads of the Democratic Party's leading female candidates? Bernie has made some bad enemies. Ten days before the Iowa caucuses, the great unifier of the Democratic Party remains Donald Trump. But now, with Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina dead ahead, the Democrats' focus is becoming: Who should replace Trump? The rival claims of the constituent elements inside the party are rising to the fore. And what they reveal is a Democratic Party that is a coalition of groups that seem to be dividing along the lines of ideology, politics, race, class and culture. Consider the most loyal of Democratic constituents in presidential elections: African Americans. They are 13% of the electorate but a fourth of the national Democratic vote. Yet, of the six candidates for the nomination on stage in the last debate, not one was African American. Not one was Hispanic or Asian. Four were white men, and two were white women. The lone outsider rising in the polls is another white man, a multibillionaire who is willing to spend a billion dollars to buy the presidential nomination of the party of the common man. Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/

Last week, the New York Times surveyed an “anxious Democratic Establishment” and found people casting about for new presidential candidates, and some prospective candidates giving a late entry into the race at least of modicum of thought. Former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Attorney General Eric Holder, former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio have all apparently been approached by insiders or have otherwise considered jumping in. These musings may not be, and probably are not, very serious. But if anyone on the sidelines is truly planning a last-minute attempt to shake up the primary, they should recognize that the track record of late entrants is atrocious. In September 2003, some Democrats were briefly thrilled to see former NATO Commander Wesley Clark, who opposed the still-raging Iraq War, enter the race. They worried that the hot antiwar candidate of the summer, former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, didn’t have a strong enough resume or stump discipline to challenge an incumbent wartime president. Even the filmmaker Michael Moore, then one of the most influential progressive figures, looked past Dean and long-shot lefties Rep. Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton to publicly urge Clark to run, and once Clark obliged, gave him a formal endorsement. But the day after Clark became a candidate, he bobbled the question of whether he would have voted for the congressional resolution that authorized military action in Iraq: “I don't know if I would have or not. I've said it both ways because when you get into this, what happens is you have to put yourself in a position -- on balance, I probably would have voted for it.” While the initial media frenzy had shot him to the top of the national polls, he quickly fell out of first place and never got a toehold in the early states. Four years later, former Sen. (and movie star) Fred Dalton Thompson was the dream candidate of conservatives who saw in him a folksy, southern Ronald Reagan. He sought to leapfrog ahead of the Republican primary pack by biding his time until September, announcing his candidacy in glitzy, Hollywood style on “The Tonight Show.” He got an announcement bounce in the polls and even led in a few, but it wasn’t long before his stump style was widely seen as less folksy and more lazy. Within weeks, he was skewered by comedian Darrell Hammond in a devastating “Saturday Night Live” impersonation: “I’m not saying that I don’t want to be your president, because I kinda do. … It’s just, how do you campaign when you don’t like hard work and people make you sick?” He managed to eke out a third-place showing in Iowa, but barely registered in New Hampshire and he quit soon after. Perhaps the most comical late entry flameout was by then-Texas Gov. (now Secretary of Energy) Rick Perry. In August 2011, with conservatives yet again lamenting the ideological bona fides of the early GOP front-runner, Perry stormed into the race, suggesting President Obama didn’t love America and warning the Federal Reserve chairman it would be “almost treacherous, treasonous” if he moved to increase the money supply before the election. Perry’s take-no-prisoners approach rocketed him into the lead. One late August poll had him up 19 points. Then the debates came. In a September debate, under fire from his Republican rivals, Perry struggled to explain his position on Social Security, his admittance of undocumented immigrant children to public colleges, and his decision as governor requiring sixth-grade girls to be vaccinated against human papilloma virus. Soon after, his polling lead vanished. By the time he blurted out his infamous “Oops” in a November debate, he had already sunk to single digits in some polls. These three examples have a common theme. Late candidacies, almost by definition, begin with enormous hype. If that hype isn’t instantly met with an exceptional performance, the poll bubble bursts. There’s no time to iron out kinks and shake off rust. There’s no margin for error. Candidates that start earlier, in contrast, have time to overcome mistakes and turn the page on past embarrassments. In the current presidential primary, Elizabeth Warren apologized for identifying herself as an “American Indian” back in February. At the time it seemed like the lingering controversy about her ancestry was going to stifle her campaign before it could get off the ground. Today, several white papers later, the matter rarely comes up (at least, among Democrats). Similarly, Joe Biden has been able to move past his controversial comments in June about working alongside segregationist senators during his early career. Party loyalists can get anxious around the midway point of the primary season because presidential candidates are flawed human beings, and the harsh spotlight of the campaign trail exposes those imperfections. Even today, when the Democratic leaders all consistently beat President Trump in trial-heat polls, seeing those candidates perform inconsistently on the stump, take policy positions that carry general election risk, or awkwardly shift on issues out of political calculation, stirs up worries that the polls will shift for the worse in the fall of next year. Candidates on the sidelines, who have yet to go through the wringer, will always look shiny by comparison … until they get off the sidelines. Late entries are bound to receive a crush of attention, and unless they perform to perfection, they will be crushed by that attention. Anxious Democrats, keep that mind, and get used to your imperfect field.Source: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/