Hillary Mendoza

Spoiler alert:  This piece is not about baseball.

If you are a baseball fan, though, you will be passingly familiar with a former major league player by the name of Mario Mendoza Aizpuru, most familiarly known simply as "Mario Mendoza."  Mendoza played for three teams in nine completely undistinguished big-league seasons from 1974 to 1982.  He was a shortstop and sometime second and third baseman.

That he is at all remembered today is for his rather weak bat, the one that left him with a .215 career batting average.  If you don't follow baseball, let me explain that a .215 average is very poor indeed, the kind that makes you wonder how he could possibly even be in the majors for nine seasons.

Mendoza's hitting was so poor, in fact, that he is remembered as a ".200 hitter" (baseball tends to round when it exaggerates for effect).  He is remembered in a way he can't be proud of -- the average of .200, below which one is regarded as truly awful, or as having had a truly awful streak, is now known throughout the game as the "Mendoza Line" in his honor.

I said this piece was not about baseball, and it is not.  Mendoza was only a league-average defender at shortstop and a very poor hitter over his career, yet today, at 65, he is hauling down a major-league pension and has at least nine years worth of bubble-gum cards as a tribute to his presence in the majors.  He reached the top 1% (or better) of his profession, and when he got there, he showed that we rise to our lowest level of incompetence.  Being in the majors did not make him "good."

And so we look at the 2016 presidential campaign, and how that lesson applies to one Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton.  If you read me often enough, you know exactly where this is going.

Last night I got a call from a polling service from a phone number in Tomball, Texas.  The caller had ten minutes worth of questions, and they were heavily about the presidential campaign.  There were a number of "Do you strongly agree, just agree, disagree or strongly disagree with the following statement ..." type of questions.

Those questions then gave one of a reasonably balanced (left-right) set of statements such as whether Donald Trump was too this or that to be president, or whether Hillary Clinton's scandals meant this or that.  You get the idea.

One such question led me to the baseball analogy.  I don't recall the exact question, but it was a bit tough to give a proper answer, because it referred to Hillary's "experience."  Now, she has some experience as a senator, and some experience as Secretary of State.  As to whether that is a good thing, well, see, that's a very different story.

Hillary is not a stupid woman, but her time as Secretary of State had some very stupid activities for which she is responsible to this day -- the Iraq withdrawal allowing that nation to collapse and ISIS to rise, the Russia "reset" that allowed the problem in Ukraine and the rise of Russia as a greater world power, the Libya policy that left an ungoverned nation, letting four Americans die in Benghazi, that sort of thing.

And that's without all the corrupt stuff regarding her thwarting of the FOIA laws with a private email server.

So when you ask if she has "experience", per se, well, she has some.  In a different candidate, it would probably be enough to run for president, and not have anyone think that they weren't experienced enough.

But the real question is not experience but competence.  If you are Secretary of State for a few years and all your most critical foreign policy initiatives failed, and you cannot point to a single major successful effort, then you might just as well not have ever served. 

Or been ... Mario Mendoza.

How are they different?  Mario Mendoza managed to gain nine years of major-league service time by simply being associated with teams at the right time, teams who needed someone to plug in at short and not field badly, whether or not they could hit above the Mendoza Line.

Hillary Clinton got to be senator and Secretary of State not by any indication of competence but by virtue of being married to a former president.  Once in office herself, she showed herself not competent to serve, able to put the country at risk while digging a hole for our foreign policy that it will take a true leader to get us out of.  At the same time, she operated with true contempt for the rights of the people she served -- the taxpayer -- and the transparency we expect and, by law, are entitled to.

In other words, her experience is worth about what Mario Mendoza's experience was worth -- a pension and not much else.  In her case, a pension is not warranted, having not served in office for 20 years or more like most people need to.  She'll get one, but that's the relative unaccountability of government.

Hillary Clinton can plead all she wants to, and her acolytes, sycophants, Stephanopouloses and other assorted toadies can plead all they want to, that she has the experience needed to be president.  But if her experience was poor, and her performance not competent for the position entrusted to her, then how exactly is that experience worth anything.

And that's why as I answered the poll question, I thought of Mario Mendoza.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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