The best and the brightest today do not seem to be flocking to Hillary Clinton’s supposed campaign for president in 2016. Instead, Bill’s aging cohorts have been recalled to a restoration and told to line up, much as they have in the Jeb Bush effort.
But maybe it is that phrase they are using: “Ready for Hillary.” It mistakenly assumes that rising generations will want to be just like Bill and Hillary when they grow up; when they mature (when they are “ready”), although that has never happened in the history of the world. Indeed, the engine of time and history is as the great anthropologist Sir James George Frazer has proposed: All rising generations seeking success want to chop down father’s tree to start again as George Washington did.
{mosads}And that seems to be what is happening with the Democrats. The energy is going to dynamic new people, specifically Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb (D). Add to the list now the formidable New York mayor, Bill de Blasio (D), who offered an op-ed in the Huffington Post — “Don’t Soul-Search. Stiffen Your Backbone” — directly after the Democrats’ catastrophic losses on Nov. 4.
But there is more to that phrase, much more. When I am asked if I am ready for Hillary, it presumes that there is something wrong with the way that I already was before I was ready for Hillary, which I am not. There must have been something wrong from the beginning to bring this inadequacy. The phrase is authoritarian; things tend to be with the military generals and Rhodes scholars in the preposterously named “Clinton Global Initiative.” Possibly they failed to pass the “Ready for Hillary” slogan by the English majors. It is the language of the missionary as well; the way they talk at you, they, the new priests who hope to accompany the new conquistadors.
But conservatives are right to believe that Mary Landrieu, the “last remaining statewide officeholder from the Deep South” of the Democratic Party, lost because Louisana was not ready for Hillary. But it may be that this time, the South was ready for Hillary.
And that is perhaps why state governments suddenly, spontaneously, turned red all across America on Nov. 4. The day approaches, much as Napoleon approached Moscow in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace; as a harbinger, a benign threat that grows more threatening as time draws closer, a perfect literary device to frame Tolstoy’s story and Hillary’s, as we have felt her approaching since she first entered the White House as first lady on Jan. 20, 1993, and refused to bake cookies.
Now it comes finally into sight. But now America is ready; “Ready for Hillary.”
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.