Illa in Manila: Will History Demand Trump-Hillary II?

by Matt Taibbi | Jul 10, 2024

Politico yesterday cited a survey showing Hilly Clinton “slightly ahead” of Kamala Harris, leading Trump “43 percent to 41 percent.” The Hill followed up with an article that put Hillary’s name first in the headline, and noted that she outperformed a slew of other oft-mentioned candidates, including California’s Gavin Newsom and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

Slowly, as if pulled by cats, the name of Hillary Clinton is making its way into editorial speculations about the Democratic nomination. My podcast partner Walter Kirn wrote the following on June 28th. Why won’t he be right?

Clinton-Trump II is the disgusting, lurid, embarrassing, corrupt, pornographic, score-settling, possibly cathartic cage-fight the country needs to have. Hillary is also the best candidate. She’s the closest thing to a true representative of her party’s attitudes. More than “defending democracy” or beating back “fascism,” the dominant concern of blue-party politics for years has been the urge to re-litigate the Great Disobedience. The interfering Putin for his insolence will already spend eternity awaiting a missile up the pipe, the Pentagon has thrown hundreds of millions at war with “fake news” and “disinformation” (whatever prompted your mistaken dislike of the candidate), and even long-tamed Bernie Sanders remains unforgiven while this error of history stands. Tom Nichols in The Atlantic wrote just last week:

Party elders, led by Barack Obama and assisted by others such as Nancy Pelosi and Jim Clyburn, could then convene a war council and talk to almost every interested candidate. (Almost. Maybe, for once, Bernie Sanders… could sit this one out.) The Democrats… need a smoke-filled room.

They finally have the smoke-filled room, and papers across the country have been busy making passionate arguments for perhaps the only conceivable scenarios that could end with Hillary Clinton as nominee:

James Carville’s guest essay in the New York Times, headlined “Biden Won’t Win. Democrats Need a Plan. Here’s One,” didn’t give itself away early, offering a populist note instead:

We need to move forward. But it can’t be by anointing Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else as the presumptive Democratic nominee. We’ve got to do it out in the open…

Avoiding the seemingly more important question of who should be Commander-in-Chief if Joe Biden is incapacitated, Democrats have begun speaking as if candidate Joe Biden is already long gone (one can imagine him protest “Not dead yet!” in a Pythonesque squeak as aides ponder cremation or burial in front of him). They’ve also been busy proposing “mini-primary” and “blitz primary” concepts that exclude voters from potential renomination processes. Perhaps the author of “It’s the economy, stupid” had a different idea?

Nope:

We can recruit the two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions: Barack Obama and Bill Clinton… they know how to win…

 

I would advise Presidents 42 and 44 to select eight leading contenders out of the pool of those who choose to run, with Ms. Harris most definitely getting a well-earned invite.

Pundits in the last days expended extraordinary energy dreaming ways to remove Biden without voter input. In a common scenario Obama and Clinton choose nominees. Carville’s version also has the ex-presidents playing the press role, moderating weeks of town halls as the “two most obvious and qualified people in the world to facilitate substantive discussions.”

The Democratic Convention would then feature a final reveal in which “42 and 44” congratulate Gretchen Whitmer, Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom’s haircut, or whomever Biden’s delegates “choose” in this “superdemocratic” process. Carville imagines great ratings throughout. “Think the Super Bowl with Taylor Swift in the stands,” he says (what is it with these people and Taylor Swift?). However, if scripting a boffo ending is the idea, Obama or Bill Clinton handing a rose to a non-player character like Whitmer or Kentucky’s Andy Beshear won’t cut it:

Carville writes that while his friend Rahm Emmanuel usually gets credit for the line, it was Winston Churchill who advised, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” In that spirit, he says, an “open process” — the Democratic convention as a speed-dating show hosted by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton — is the best way to honor Churchill’s wisdom, in what he calls “our own ‘Will democracy prevail?’ moment.”

This piece is as nearly perfect a distillation of current blue-party thinking as you can get, down to the Trump-as-Hitler analogy in the end (you can hear dive-bombing Junkers underneath Carville’s narration). These folks really believe they’re saving London during the Blitz and are so busy making Spitfire sounds in the mirror, they can’t see the humor in the faux-solemn “He would have wanted us to move on” attitudes they’re adopting even as Joe Biden still stands babbling in their ears.

Pundits all seem to be getting the same memo, both about the composition of the inevitable royal commission and the Very Exciting Nominees they will pick! “A small group of party leaders — say, Biden, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Jen O’Malley Dillon — should decide on a new candidate,” wrote Jonathan Chait in New York. The Daily Beast, New York Times and many others are drawing up suspiciously similar lists of possibles, beginning with Harris but also including Whitmer, Newsom, J.B. Pritzker, Beshear, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Cory Booker. Even former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick told CNN he’d “seriously” consider jumping in if the race were to open.

If those names sound familiar, it’s the list of every Wall Street approved hack who couldn’t poll above lint in the 2020 cycle despite hurricanes of adoring free media at their backs. The ingenious “mini-primary” idea therefore boils down to clearing decks so the same clutch of decomposing aristocrats who put Biden in office in the first place can roll out the same slate of interchangeably unelectable neoliberal fuckwits Democratic voters rejected in 2020 in favor of a clear dementia sufferer, a list that conspicuously includes the current Vice President.

That strategy is just dumb enough to be believable, but the truly inspired bad idea, the one that would make the whole world convulse with horror and wonder is obvious. It has to be Hillary, especially since the party seems determined to create a process receptive to the idea. Pollster and longtime member of the DNC executive committee Jim Zogby described to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now his vision of a “very democratic and transparent process” for removing the still-wriggling Biden that would require a mini-quorum of apparatchiks to approve a candidacy:

Anyone who wanted to be nominated for president… would have to have the signature of 40 sitting members of the Democratic National Committee, including at least four from each of the four regions… Very few people could actually do that. It would be people that we know. It would be Governor Whitmer, it would be Cory Booker, it would be Kamala Harris and Governor Newsom and Governor Pritzker and maybe Governor Shapiro…

Few are saying the Clinton name out loud, but the political mainstream has been building pyramid complexes to her resentment for eight years, and this campaign will reflect that, whether she is or is not the candidate. By any pre-2016 standard Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” comment was a pointless error, gaining no new voters while firing up opposition. At the time, even most major media outlets said as much. Over time, though, commentators not only tossed the broader civics reason for avoiding such outbursts — “Like it or not, they too are America,” was how Psychology Today described Trump voters — but denounced the idea of trying to win such support or even recognize the humanity of disfavored demographics, arguing that in Trump’s America this is pointless, immoral even.

This never made sense as electoral strategy, but it makes a ton of sense as an emotional imperative for a party that would rather spot Donald Trump 70-plus million votes than admit it screwed up even once. The Los Angeles Times just doubled down on the idea, saying “roughly half the country” has “settled willingly into white nationalism, which runs not on facts but on emotion.” As for polls showing Trump and Biden nearly tied among Hispanic survey respondents and black support for Trump rising by as much as 20 points since 2020, voters are just wrong. “Trump brags about how much Black folk love him,” the LAT continued, adding his claims only stand “because the party needs to keep up the pretense of ‘all men are created equal’ fairness.”

Trying to understand post-2016 Democrats as a traditional party concerned with winning is a fool’s errand. If they were that, they’d have run a competitive primary and never made a proven-unelectable figure like Harris VP. If anything, insiders act like the stubborn unpopularity of Harris is a plus, and the irony there is that attitude is just like MAGA voters who embrace Trump because he horrifies the right people, like the pseudo-intellectual neighbors with blue-haired kids and a “Hate Has No Home Here” sign. Bill Clinton in 1992 swept West Virginia, but his wife proudly lost by 40 points, and Biden did the same after scolding miners to “learn to program.” This iteration of Democrats is not primarily interested in winning, especially if it requires talking to anyone who’s voted for Trump. They are in a punitive mood, wanting to win and Bobbitize the disloyal electorate.

Many messages have been sent already. Clinton always detested candidates like Jill Stein and Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich and Tulsi Gabbard and Sanders, lumping them in one group of line-jumping irritants whose presence “trivialized” debates and could only “hurt Democrats,” by which she of course meant herself. In 2024 Marianne Williamson, Dean Phillips, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. were effectively wiped from primary ballots while Stein, Cornel West, Kennedy, and the No Labels party spent the year with hyper-litigious Clintonworld lawyers like Marc Elias draped on them like herpes sores. No “trivial” populists are being mentioned in the many lists of what Chait calls “high-powered” Democrats: they’re all gubernatorial mannequins with bright futures as ratings-killing MSNBC hosts. The principle of limiting the “positive only” debate to “viable” or “real” Democrats is more important than beating Trump, as is the frankly hilarious concept of a “primary” in which news media are replaced by even wealthier and more off-putting celebrity questioners.

Clinton of course always hated the media. She also never got over 2016 battles in Iowa (where she was forced to stay up all night to fend off Sanders by three-tenths of a percentage point) and especially New Hampshire, where she lost by 22 points despite the support of back-then versions of Taylor Swift (Lena Dunham, Christina Aguilera and America Ferrera). Furious surrogates lashed out at New Hampshire Democrats, with Madeleine Albright saying there was a “special place in hell” for the state’s female voters after they chose Sanders over Hillary by 11 points. By 2024 the famously transparent Iowa caucus was obliterated in favor of an opaque mail-in “preference card” process, with results announced not deep into the night anymore, but months after election. Results of this year’s New Hampshire primary involving actual voters were tossed in favor of an absurd second weekend “nominating event” handled in secret by party loyalists. Biden was the beneficiary, but this version of a primary season seems to have been built with Hillary Clinton’s peculiar fixations in mind.

It makes sense to re-run the 2016 race because it’s the unresolved argument of our era: who’s worse, elites or deplorables? Jeb Bush inadvertently provided the formula for a deplorable victory. A member of a hereditary political dynasty who could be rattled by personal attacks was Trump’s perfect target, and as quickly as Jeb went down, Hillary was an even more perfect foil (“a pitch right in Trump’s wheelhouse” is how I described it in early 2016). Hillary started off loving Trump as an opponent. Her campaign wanted him to win after all, and she even tried out a “Duh, you’re a losah!” Trump impersonation early in the race. Soon, though, the Secretary of State who approved 407 drone strikes in Pakistan alone began giving unsmiling speeches about the need to “stand up to bullies wherever they are,” as soon as Trump started viral debates about her “disgusting” bathroom break or being “schlonged” by Obama.

Did Trump venture into sexist territory with his insults? Absolutely! Did the tactics work? They did. Clinton’s sense of humor failure about Trump was so comprehensive that by mid-summer 2016 her speeches acquired a Medusoid intensity and she began second-guessing herself. In one June speech, while referring to his “nasty tweets,” she glanced side to side and said, “I’m willing to bet he’s composing a few right now.” He was, at that exact moment:

This expert trolling eventually prompted Hillary to blow up and make exactly the argument Trump wanted and needed her to make: there must be something wrong with voters and/or democracy itself to allow a creature like Trump to exist. The “basket of deplorables” debacle strengthened Trump’s pitch that Hillary and her “wealthy donors” were assuming victory while laughing at the “very people who pave the roads… and paint the buildings.” These lines were guaranteed to work, especially as the “too much democracy” pundits piled on, with people like former White House budget chief turned Citigroup Vice Chair Peter Orszag saying America needed to “jettison the civics 101 fairy tale” about “pure representative democracy” and rely on “automatic policies and depoliticized commissions” to head off popular nuttery of the Trump variety.

Every time Clinton complained about her deplorable opponents messing with her presidential birthright, she sounded like the Marquis St. Evremonde stepping over a carriage-flattened child, i.e. “Do you know what injury you might do to my horses?” Or, as The Onion put it in that cycle’s most memorable headline: “Hillary Clinton to Nation: ‘Do Not Fuck This Up For Me.’”

Of course voters did (fuck things up for her), so officials spent the next eight years trying everything from censorship to canceling primaries to criminally prosecuting opponents in the belief that if they could just find the right democratic loophole to close and/or convict the right miscreants, proles will lack the option of betrayal and be forced to embrace what Carville is now calling a “staggeringly talented new generation of leaders.” Since this remains more or less the official position of the Democratic Party, Hillary might as well be the one to make it.

Only by annulling the great mistake can Democrats restore normalcy. Only by beating Hillary without talk of Russians, Jim Comey, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, the Stormy coverup, and all the other excuses can Trump put talk of his first term being “illegitimate” to rest. Both parties need this to happen, and if we can get through four months of it, We The People might finally be exorcised from this insane period. If the American idea is at its end, let’s at least go down with some ratings. Bring on the Ali-Frazier of Suck!

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