Gee, Hillary, It's Been Real

This morning I arose to yet another poll in the upcoming presidential campaign.  We don't like, actually, vote for another 14 months plus a little, but Lord knows that the entertainment value of political campaigns in this country is worth all the effort and expense, right?

Today's poll showed about a seven-point gap between the presumptive, anointed one on the Democrat side (that would be Hillary Clinton), and the leading challenger, the confessed socialist Bernie Sanders.  Now, by rights Sanders shouldn't even be polling above communist-fringe percentages, since his views are decidedly the far-left, extreme redistributionist kind of notions that fail as soon as you run out of someone else's money.

Seven points is not a great deal, which is pretty much the point.  As we speak, the fact that anyone, let alone a socialist, could get close to Hillary Clinton in the polls in her own party is a sign that seems pretty relevant, at least to me, and indicates one simple thing:

Her candidacy is cooked.

Hillary Clinton is almost 68 years old and will be 69 even before the 2016 election.  To say that her views are "baked in" is an understatement.  She has actually had a relatively short time in actual public service (one-plus Senate terms and a few years as Secretary of State) to have proposed any "new ideas", to resurrect Gary Hart, but has essentially no innovation on her brief resume.  At 69, it's pretty safe for us to infer that we've seen all there is.

And that, friends, is the point of the piece and the message of the polls.  Hillary Clinton has nowhere to go but down, since she has really nothing new to say, to do or to offer that will attract new voters to her.  There is ample time, and a growing number of alternatives, for those who do name her in the polls as their choice, to drift away to other choices between now and the primaries.

If, of course, she is not in jail before then ... but I digress.

You know how there's a lot of difference between a wedding and a marriage?  One is a one-day ceremony (mostly) that girls dream of, and the marriage is the part that is the rest of your life, where you have to be a wife or husband, and it becomes incumbent on you forever to be part of a team.

I think that analogy applies here.  It is as if Hillary and her sycophants believe in this huge entitlement to election as president.  The big day for them is the election, and that's what they see and what they work for -- election

The electorate, on the other hand, is not so singularly devoted to an Election Day result as they are to having, well, their country recover from the embarrassment of the last seven years.  They care -- we care -- far more about the marriage than the wedding.  And the more we see ourselves potentially "married" to  Hillary as president, the more scared we get (you think Bill has a few regrets?), and the more we search for alternatives.

You get the point.  For someone as known as Hillary Clinton, as predictable, as old, and with as many unlikeability polls as high as hers, it will be extremely difficult to hold on to one's poll shares, let alone come up with something to attract additional voters to your side.

It will be equally difficult to gain poll numbers when the other side -- the Republicans -- have so many candidates spanning the spectrum as alternatives.  It has been said that it has hurt Hillary's campaign that there have been so few Democrat opponents, sapping air time and not giving her time to hone (or actually develop) some debate skills.  I think it is correspondingly damaging that there are so many on the Republican side, breadth of views, ideas, backgrounds, ethnicities and other things to attract interest.

Hillary Clinton has nothing to attract new supporters.  We've heard it all.

I'm certainly not unhappy at her declining poll numbers; she is difficult to imagine as president (the marriage part) and far too leftist to engage any of her view as reasonable.  But the fact of "competitors" creeping up on her should surprise no one.  We've seen all she's got to offer and there really isn't anything else there.

Bye, bye, Mrs. Clinton.  There won't be a wedding this time.

Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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