Two-Fer's

Via memeorandum, I happened upon a Boston Herold column by Margery Eagan that articulates something telling about Hillary Clinton. When her husband first ran for president and suggested the nation would get, in effect, a "two-fer" if he was elected, reaction was swiftly and strongly negative. While Hillary does not, of course, use the phrase now, there is no doubt that but for her husband she would never have been elected to the Senate, let alone the front runner now for the Democratic presidential nomination. Indeed, Bill's slowly increasing visibility in Hillary's campaign strongly suggests their probably correct belief that she cannot win unless the nation now does believe it would, in effect, be getting a two-fer.

Most career politicians are neither very intelligent nor very honest. Intelligence (as opposed to cunning) is not a particularly useful political trait and can be a serious handicap. Voters say but do not really believe they want leaders much smarter than they are and most voters are not very smart. Honesty, on the other hand, is a fatal quality in a politician, as the art of politics is essentially the art of self-interested lying. What a career politician really needs most is likability of the game show host variety (think Pat Sajak, not Alex Trebek).

Neither of the Clintons lack intelligence, though neither is nearly as smart as claimed, either; and, of course, neither has ever been hampered in the slightest by even the most occasional outburst of honesty. But what makes Bill Clinton sui generis among contemporary politicians is his almost superhuman ability to make people who don't know him like him and trust him. Okay, maybe not with their wives or girlfriends, but with something less important like the presidency.

And therein lies Hillary's major political liability: her own uncanny ability to make strangers dislike her is almost as keen. Whatever she may be like in person behind closed doors when her public persona is not in jeopardy and no matter how hard she tries to improve that public persona, Hillary Clinton has a Nixon-like offensiveness about her. Simply put, she lacks the common touch. In spades.

Whether Bill Clinton's presidency, blemished as it was, is ultimately deemed a success (and I believe it will be), the fact that he ever became president was as much an accident of fate as the result of his lifelong will to power. George H.W. Bush's popularity had scared away the likely Democratic candidates, opening an opportunity for an obscure governor to have a shot at the nomination when conventional wisdom unanimously believed Bush would easily win a second term. So much for conventional wisdom.

The Clintons could not, of course, make any of that happen. They could only be ready and willing to run when it did, and they were. They have been planning a comeback ever since, believing correctly that 2004 would have been too soon for Hillary and 2012 might be too late. And now yet another failed Bush presidency may be handing them the keys to the White House yet again, for no Republican candidate likely to win the nomination can or will distance himself far enough away from Bush to escape partial blame for the damage Bush and his willing accomplices in Congress have done to the party and to the nation in the last six and a half years.

The only thing really standing in their way is Hillary, herself, who must now hope the country is at last ready for a two-fer.