It was 11:30 p.m. on the night of the Iowa caucuses and Hillary Clinton had a decision to make. She was ahead of Bernie Sanders by less than 1 percent of the vote count and most of the precincts were in. But her lead was shrinking. If she waited much longer, her victory speech might turn into a concession. So instead of taking the risk, she chose a middle course: She went out before the cameras, even as Ted Cruz was giving his own valediction, to deliver a speech that was neither victorious nor conciliatory. It was ghastly.
With her former president husband standing behind her slack-jawed — his mouth hung weirdly agape throughout her remarks — nearly the entire six-and-a-half-minute affair was pitched at a shout. Clinton's eyes bulged, the thumb of her closed fist jabbed the air again and again. She proclaimed that she most certainly was a progressive and, as if to prove her bona fides, provided a list of rights that she pledged her sacred honor to defend.
"We have to be united against a Republican vision and candidates that would drive us apart and divide us," she exhorted the crowd. It wasn't just the logical dissonance of the line that was off-putting: a campaign whose placards proclaim "Fighting for Us" uniting against an opposition whose chief sin is divisiveness. The delivery was stilted. She emphasized the wrong words and lilted her voice upwards in midsentence as if asking a question, so that the line sounded like: "We have to be UNITED? — when it's all said and DONE — we have to be UNITED? against a REPUBLICAN vision and candidates that would DRIVE us apart and divide us."
It was the type of performance that brought home what an awful campaigner Clinton is. Or rather, has become. Because despite what you might think, she wasn't always this bad.
One of the common misperceptions about the 2008 campaign is that Hillary Clinton gacked the nomination like a kicker pushing a 30-yard field goal into the sidelines. This is not quite right. She made a critical miscalculation in not spending enough to organize several small-state caucuses. That hurt her dearly. But she also suffered from several factors beyond her control: the left's continuing rejection of the Iraq war, the media's complicity in keeping John Edwards viable until he could wound her in Iowa, and the total solidarity of African-American voters with Barack Obama. Because of these developments, the Democratic party establishment abandoned her at the first opportunity, taking with it superdelegates, endorsements, and a giant pile of money, all of which it eagerly transferred to Obama. And despite all of this, Clinton still won more Democratic primary votes than Obama did— only to find out that the party of Al Gore was suddenly obsessed with procedural technicalities and no longer cared about raw vote totals.