Hillary Clinton Is a Nobody

As we steel ourselves for the final presidential debate, it is worth remembering that Hillary Clinton has no talents that would have brought her to public attention, had she not married Bill Clinton. For the first time ever, “service” as First Lady is offered as a qualification for the presidency. Hillary carpet-bagged a Senate seat, running in New York while she was the First Lady, living in the White House. She thereby took unfair advantage of a privileged position that she held only by virtue of her marriage.

Her tenure in the Senate was so undistinguished that, I have read, she doesn’t even mention it in her autobiography. I can’t say for sure since, like virtually all other Americans, I have had better things to do than read Hillary’s book.

Next it was on to the State Department. Here, Hillary’s performance was abysmal. She accomplished nothing in four years, and was sometimes embarrassed, as by the misbegotten (and misspelled) Russian “reset.” Documents released pursuant to various Freedom of Information Act requests demonstrate beyond debate that Hillary and her sycophantic circle intended the overthrow of Moammar Qaddafi in Libya to be the crown jewel of her diplomatic career and the basis of her inevitable presidential run.

Only Hillary committed an appalling blunder: she led the overthrow of a government without having a plan for what would come next. What came next was predictable to anyone with any sense–chaos, and a vacuum that was quickly filled by Islamic terrorists, particularly ISIS. The fiasco of Benghazi, and her lies about that fiasco, were the bitter fruits of the broader disaster of her Libya policy.

Now she is running for president–sort of. She makes as few campaign appearances as possible, and wherever she goes she is greeted by small, unenthusiastic crowds. Most people would as soon get a root canal as listen to one of her speeches. As she nears the finish line, she is being propped up: figuratively by the press, which is determined to drag her across the finish line, and literally by her aides when she falls down, or appears about to.

All of that is a preamble to an email exchange that was made public yesterday by Wikileaks. It is an email thread between Hillary’s campaign manager, John Podesta, and Neera Tanden, supposedly a close friend of Hillary and the head of the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank that is a branch of the Democratic Party. The date is September 15, 2015. What prompts the emails is Hillary’s exclamation to an audience in Ohio, “You know, I get accused of being kind of moderate and center, I plead guilty.”

First, here are the emails as disclosed by Wikileaks. Click to enlarge:

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Neera Tanden begins:

Why did she call herself a moderate?

This was, of course, during the windup to the 2016 primary season, when Hillary’s main competition came from the far left. The response from Podesta–her campaign manager!–is stunning:

I pushed her on this on Sunday night. She claims she didn’t remember saying it. Not sure I believe her. We were speculating, that it may be a Don Baer intervention.

This is remarkable on two levels. First, Hillary described herself as a moderate–seemingly a significant point–and then claimed she didn’t remember doing so. That raises questions about her mental acuity. But Podesta says he isn’t sure he believes her, which means that her own campaign manager thinks she is a liar. Don Baer, if you wondered, is a former communications director and speechwriter for Bill Clinton, who apparently was suspected by the Left of having moderate tendencies.

Neera Tanden wraps up the dialogue:

I mean it makes my life more difficult after telling every reporter I know she’s actually progressive but that is really the smallest of issues. It worries me more that she doesn’t seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment.

“She doesn’t seem to know what planet we are all living in at the moment.” Tanden, a Democratic Party operative, refers to Hillary Clinton with casual contempt–when talking to Hillary’s campaign manager, who, she obviously thinks, shares that contempt.

It appears that Hillary Clinton, in the eyes of her closest associates, is a pathetic figure, neither truthful nor competent. Today we could add, not only is she neither truthful nor competent, she may not be capable of standing at a podium without help.

It is remarkable that a woman with few if any accomplishments, who is viewed with casual contempt by those who know her best, is apparently on the brink of being elected president.

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