Blankley Gets It

Tony Blankley, on the inevitability of President Hillary Rodham:

With every passing week it becomes more likely that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic Party nominee for president. This thought, alone, should provide the strongest possible motivation to the Bush Administration and the Washington Republicans to get their acts together so that the eventual Republican nominee for president doesn't start the general election campaign in too deep a hole.

Fat chance. When has that bunch had its act together at any time in the past four years? Heck, the latter are too busy trying to run away from the former to even notice Mrs. Clinton moving in behind them with the length of telephone cord.

The polls that show half the country saying they won't vote for Hillary should be discounted. At the election, the choice will not be Hillary or not Hillary -- it will be Hillary or someone else. And that is what the campaign is about. ...

Moreover, Hillary's strengths are not yet as appreciated as they will be. Don't get me wrong, personally I find her and her candidacy detestable as the worst form of unprincipled, ruthless, nihilistic, mud-throwing demagogic politics. But for the Democratic Party electorate (and some Independents and soft Republicans) her apparent strengths will become more persuasive.

I.e. the same "apparent strengths" that were so decisive for Donk congressional candidates last November - she's not a Republican. And, more to the point, she's the polar opposite of George W. Bush.

And, you know, Clintons always, um, pound Bushes.

Currently she suffers by the media's focus on her lack of spontaneity, charm or pleasant voice - particularly when compared with Obama and, to some extent, Edwards. But charm is not the only path to the American voter. Richard Milhous Nixon won more national elections than any politician in our history (two vice presidents, three presidential nominations and two presidencies - three if you count the stolen 1960 election against Kennedy). He didn't have any charm - but he was smart, shrewd, highly political, hard working and ruthless. Sometimes the voters are looking for what they think is competence rather than a love affair.

Double-underline "ruthless." Hillary sounds a lot like Nixon, but the biggest difference between them is that whereas Nixon's ruthlessness was bumblingly incompetent (C'mon, he'd have had to almost be trying to screw up not to be able to survive Watergate), Hillary's is a well-oiled machine. The Clinton machine, that is, that ran propaganda roughshod over every scandal-related pursuer and rings around the poor, clumsy, hapless Republican Party for eight insufferable years.

And while it is true, as the stubbornly clueless Cap'n Ed points out, that Mrs. Clinton is "nowhere near as charming as her husband" and "has all of Bill's slickness and none of the salesmanship that allowed him to get away with it," she'll have two clincher advantages: a vagina and a Republican as her opponent. The former will be so overpoweringly intimidating to the latter, whoever he is, that he won't DARE even think of waging the kind of campaign that she will, replete with blatant mendacities and vicious smears and dirty tricks from which the Clinton machine and the Enemy Media will completely insulate her. It won't matter what he says or does; he'll simply be swamped, eclipsed by her cult of personality, her juggarnaut of a pre-emptive coronational procession. Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney or (God help us) Rudy Giuliani will, like Rick Lazio did in her 2000 New York senate race, spend several months saying little more than "humina-humina-humina"; center-right voters will stay home again in frustration; "independents" will be dazzled by all her "competence" hand-waving, residual Bushophobia, and the novelty of electing a woman to the presidency; and lefties will be clawing their way out of tequila comas and covens and cemetaries and bathhouses for the orgasmic opportunity to exact the ultimate revenge for the 2000 election.

If Ronald Reagan could be resurrected or cloned, he might be able to take Hillary in 2008. But none of the actual or potential stable of GOP so-called "contenders" has a prayer, because they're already beside the point. They're the Washington Generals to her Harlem Globetrotters. They're what Rocky Balboa would have been to Apollo Creed in the real world. They're already beaten. Because the 2008 election is already decided. And they don't even know it.

Well, McCain probably does....