The Party of the Clintons

Get it while you can because he doesn't archive his columns online: Mark Steyn's take on the Democrats and the probable Hillary candidacy. Here are some excerpts:

There is . . . one exception to the Dems’ dance of death: President-presumptive Hillary Rodham Clinton. The chances of a Rodham restoration in the White House are better than even. For one thing, the salient feature of the Clintons’ Democratic Party is that it was grand for the Clintons, disastrous for the party: throughout the 1990s, the Dems lost everything – the House, Senate, state legislatures, governorships - but somehow Bill and Hill were always the lone exceptions that proved the rule. In 2000, Clinton couldn’t even bequeath the White House to his Vice-President in a time of “peace and prosperity”, yet the First Lady won an unprecedented victory in a state she’d never lived in. There is no reason to believe the Clintons’ historical immunity to their party’s remorseless decay will not continue.

Second, the fact of a female candidate will send the media into orgies of diversity celebration. Right now, it’s the GOP with the star blacks (Rice), Hispanics (Martinez) and immigrants (Schwarzenegger), while the Dems are a sad collection of angry white males (Kennedy and Byrd). Were Condi to run against, say, Joe Biden in 2008, the press would play it strictly on the issues. But, if it’s Bill Frist against Hill, get set for a non-stop cavalcade of stories with little in-set photos of Mrs Thatcher, Mrs Gandhi, Mrs Bandaranaike, Golda Meir, Benazir Bhutto, Helen Clark in New Zealand, etc, etc, and headlines like “Is America Ready?” that manage to imply ever so subtly that not voting for Hillary is the 2008 equivalent of declaring Negroes are three-fifths of a human being. Yes, yes, I know – Hillarycare, Travelgate, billing records… That’ll be 16 years old on election day and nobody – or not enough – will care.

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Can Hillary be stopped? Obviously she can. But one lesson of the last 15 years is that the Democratic Party is basically a dead husk – it’s as effective as whoever’s wearing it. In the Nineties, the Clintons swiped it. For the 2004 St Vitus’ dance, Michael Moore and Barbra Streisand and moveon.org seized it and couldn’t make it work. But, if Hill takes it back . . .

Nasty notion.