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In a post on Monday, Joe Gandelman asks whether the historical odds are one of the biggest obstacles in Hillary Clinton’s quest for the presidency. He provides some pretty strong evidence:
1. According to polls, a majority of voters believe that Clinton represents a return to the policies of the past.
2. “Since 1992, with just one exception (in 2000), the younger general-election candidate has won the general election contest.”
However, Gandelman also quotes NPR’s Maria Hinojosa on Meet the Press, “I have to be honest with you. The terms ‘expiration date’ and ‘stale’ and ‘too late for you’ as a woman, it’s like, I don’t know if men have that same reaction, that’s nuclear.”
Gandelman concludes, “The question is: Can Hillary’s gender insulate her from the ‘yesterday’ issue? It’s the 2016 question the GOP may care about the most.”
Today, at the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson addresses the “history” issue from a different perspective.
He asks, “Is history finally on Hillary Clinton’s side?” and immediately answers, “Barring the political equivalent of an asteroid strike, it’s over.”
But wait, Robinson is obviously referring to the primaries where he is tempted to say, “[T]he Democratic presidential nomination is hers to lose, but I have trouble imagining any plausible way she could lose it.”
Robinson’s conclusion is ambiguous. Referring to what he expects to be more heated, more extreme, more personal attacks — “I don’t think anyone will be surprised if [they] becomes sexist as well” — from Republicans, Robinson says:
My guess is that progressive Democrats will react to these attacks by rallying around their party’s certain nominee. This time, Clinton’s inevitability looks real. History may well be on her side for a change.
While Robinson hints that when “Clinton became a different candidate” after finishing third in Iowa in 2008, she won in New Hampshire, his colleague, Richard Cohen, believes “Hillary Clinton is a survivor who does not need to reinvent herself.”
Answering those who claim Clinton needs an image makeover, define what she stands for, a slogan, etc., Cohen says:
It just so happens there is an answer, and if it needs a slogan, then I suggest the Stephen Sondheim song from “Follies ” called “I’m Still Here.” Forget the specifics of the song. Let’s just say it’s about a woman of some years who has led a hell of a life. If that’s not Clinton, then I don’t know who it is. She has been around. She has been walloped. She has been publicly betrayed and damaged and hurt. It’s not that she’s running merely as a woman. It’s that she’s a woman of some years of womanly experiences.
He adds that Clinton must not try to reinvent herself:
Hillary Clinton has been a lawyer. She has been an advocate for the poor, especially children. She’s been the first lady of Arkansas and of the United States of America. She’s been a senator from New York and Obama’s secretary of state. Her record in all those positions is worthy of a fair critique, but the fact remains that she’s unique in American political life.
After “scanning the mob of Republicans now seeking the White House,” Cohen settles it: “There’s no one who approaches Clinton in experience or standing” and concludes:
The message that I said in 2013 was missing in Hillary Clinton has been there all along. It is her — who she is, what she has done and what she has been through. Don’t wrap her in gauze and smother her in jingles. “Good times and bum times, I’ve seen them all/ And, my dear, I’m still here,” Sondheim wrote. Yes, she is
Read more from both Post columnists here and here
Lead image: www.shutterstock.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.