So, She's Really Not ... Right?

In this post I talked a bit about Hillary Clinton and her team thinking about what the future might bring. Well, in the interim, two competing articles were published. The first, from Politico, comes right out to declare that Clinton will run for President, yet again, in 2020. The second, from The Washington Post, talks about the importance of Democrats stopping Clinton from running again, and declares that she absolutely should not run again.

If you read my first post you know where I stand on this one. I can't fathom Clinton running again, at her age, after being the victim of two huge upsets. Her team collapsed against a relatively unknown Freshman Senator in 2008, and then lost the last election to an opponent who had unprecedentedly low scores in the areas of trustworthiness and likeability. Simply put, voters have made it pretty clear that they don't trust Clinton, don't believe she'd be good for the country, and that, alone, should dissuade her from running again.

Of course, Clinton loyalists will always turn to something: that Obama didn't wait his turn, that the FBI screwed her in this election, that she won the popular vote. But that misses the point. Any truly dynamic candidate never would have lost to an opponent as inexperienced as Obama; they would have beaten Obama and had him as the Vice Presidential nominee. A quality candidate never would have lost to Trump; they would have watched as he self-destructed and would have focused on reinforcing the only areas of the map where Trump could mount his counter measure (the Rust Belt), rather than largely ignoring them.

Nothing would surprise me. Hillary Clinton has spent her life, seemingly, in pursuit of the White House in one way or another, so if she feels she has the drive it wouldn't be shocking for her to put her name in at some point during the run up to 2020. That said, if she does it there will be no possible way to refute the overriding narrative: that she is doing this solely for herself and her own ego, rather than her party or, if she truly believes the Democrats are better for the country, the country itself.