I can do all the analysis I want. I can take this country, hold it up, flip it upside down, turn it around, squint at it a little bit, put it under a microscope…but, yesterday, I just took a quiet moment and tried to actually envision Hillary Clinton being sworn in as our next president. And it just didn’t seem plausible to me. It didn’t seem right. It turned out that I just couldn’t picture it actually happening.
I can’t explain why. Every time I look at the race, I can’t picture anyone else winning either the Democratic nomination or the general election. I mean, even Glenn Beck thinks she will be the next president and, amazingly, he doesn’t seem too worried about the prospect. You might even say that he sounds like he would welcome a Clinton Restoration.
The sentiments expressed by Beck are the kind of sentiments that sometimes lead me to believe that Hillary Clinton can win in a huge transformative landslide.
Beck said he received information from a friend of his, who is also friends with the “Hillary people,” about Clinton’s campaign strategy in 2016. Beck said that when he heard it, he said, “Oh my gosh, she’s going to win the presidency.”
Beck said Clinton’s “people” told his friend: “The right is so stupid. They just don’t get it. You guys are going to all be fighting on Benghazi and everything else, and here’s what Hillary is going to do. [She is going to say], ‘Do you remember when America was good? Do you remember when we had jobs and we were building towards a brighter future, and things were really happening? The Clinton administration, we had it under control. Things were good, and … we’re going to do better. We’re going to replant our flag in the traditional things that you understand.’”
“And this is what made me say, ‘Oh, my gosh, she’s going to win,’” Beck said. “Pat and I both have said in the past, ‘I would so gladly take Bill Clinton right now. Don’t those years seem simple and good [compared to today]?’”
I know Glenn Beck is a crackpot and a demagogue. But the way his mind works isn’t all that unique or unusual. How many people are there in this country who think back on the Clinton Era as a simpler and better time when the economy was going gangbusters?
And, yet, I still have some kind of instinctual feeling that something is going to happen that changes the trajectory that we appear to be on. My brain says Hillary Clinton will be our next president, but my spidey-sense tells me that this is never going to happen.
