HENNIKER, NEW HAMPSHIRE—Even Jeb (!) Bush admits it. At a stop in Bedford Saturday morning, he was telling the folks in a middle school auditorium how thoroughly his heretofore unremarkable campaign has New Hampshire wired. "In fact," he said, "we probably have more people working on campuses than anyone else."
Then he thought for a minute.
"Except Bernie. He gets credit for that, for engaging the passion of young people, for bringing joy to the campaign."
Jeb (!) went on to explain, however, that Bernie Sanders' ideas would leave the country a smoking waste of debt and zombies. ("Free college tuition. How Venezuelan is that?" That stuff slays them in Kennebunkport, folks.) But his brief burst of honesty about young voters and where they're going in this campaign not only clearly illustrated the problems he's having, but also the problems that Hillary Rodham Clinton is having as she tries to cut into Sanders' huge lead before Tuesday's Democratic primary. Some of the poll numbers were truly startling going into the final weekend's events.
Clinton was running behind Sanders among young voters, the least surprising poll result in the history of math. But she was also running behind him among young women, and she was running no better than even with him among women of all ages. This put an electric charge up the spine of the Clinton campaign, and it's probably the reason why her automatic response the other night for being called part of the "Establishment" was to scoff that she couldn't be, because she was a woman running to be president. (In truth, HRC is approximately as much a part of the country's establishment as Margaret Thatcher was before she became prime minister.) So, on Saturday, she came to a small hall at New England College to get down wit' da yout'. It wasn't quite a walk in the lion's den. But it wasn't exactly a walk in the summer rain, either. For example, the trust issue, which would be bedeviling the HRC campaign even if Bernie Sanders never had been born, hung over the very first question asked of her. This was a huge part of her answer:
Let me give you a little bit of history. I have been in public life for a number of years. I brought with me into my husband's administration a long history of taking on tough issues. I know what it takes to achieve progress. For the last 25 years, since I've been in the national spotlight, first in the eight years of my husband's presidency, and then my eight years in the Senate, and then as Secretary of State, I know that I am viewed as a direct threat to the forces that call a lot of the shots in this country. When I took on the cause of universal healthcare in 1994, the drug companies and the insurance companies spent millions of dollars. And, look. It's not a stupid strategy. You sow doubts about somebody. You make claims about somebody. You undermine somebody, and even if it is not true, it leaves exactly the impression that you describe. I'm aware of that. Part of the reason I'm running is that I have stood up against these forces. I have been on the front lines, and I am still standing and there are still people trying to rip me down.
Look at, there it is again. Let's talk about Benghazi. It was investigated nine times…There were mistakes, but what did they find? Nothing beyond that; after [I was] testifying for 11 hours, they came out and said we didn't learn anything new, after admitting that the whole idea was to bring me down politically…Let's talk about the e-mails. Secretary [Colin] Powell, Secretary [Condoleeza ] Rice's aide used private e-mails. Everybody knew that…On the e-mails, what is happening is whether something that was not classified when it was either sent or received should be retroactively classified. Secretary Powell said, "This is an absurdity." So now the Republicans have anything? Of course not, but they want you to have these doubts.
There isn't a clause in that passage with which any reasonable person can disagree, especially any reasonable person who lived through the Great Penis Chase of the 1990s. HRC has had a bullseye on her back ever since she got to Washington. Some of the attacks upon her from the radio monkeyhouse were distasteful and extreme, and they set the template for the unreasoning assaults upon the current president.
But…
It's also a passage that's an awful tangle of the first person, and that's even assuming that any of the young people in the audience remember the events of the 1990s, which is a longshot bet at best. It involves you if you lived through those days, and you can see the continuum between then and now. (But, if you do, then you're likely on the HRC bandwagon anyway.) But there are two huge intervening events: One was the debacle of the Iraq War, and the other was the economic vandalism that came to light in 2008. Neither of those ever was properly litigated by the proper institutions. So, they get litigated in our politics. In 2008, fairly or unfairly, people litigated the Iraq War by hanging it around HRC's candidacy. There's more than a little evidence that, this time around, fairly or unfairly, they're litigating the near-destruction of the economy the same way. That's a tough albatross to shake.
There's no question that part of the Sanders campaign's appeal is its ability to engage young people as members of a kind of movement. (This has drawn more than a little condescension from people who really ought to know better.) It's not so much that he's trying to rebuild the Obama coalition as he's trying to recapture its spirit. HRC has struggled mightily, and not altogether unsuccessfully, to do the same thing. An era in which the first woman president followed the first African-American president would be one of the most remarkable periods in American political history—and the most remarkable period in American electoral history—and it would likely keep historians busy for the next couple of centuries.
But her primary strength, that in terms of a CV, she might be the most qualified presidential candidate that we've seen since James Monroe, by a curious kind of reverse English, keeps that enthusiasm spinning just out of her reach. She has been the wife of the governor of Arkansas, a gifted public interest lawyer and a successful corporate counsel, First Lady of the United States, a senator from a huge and important state, the Secretary of State, and now she's running for president, as the odds-on favorite, for the second time. She is unquestionably part of the establishment, but she's also undeniably a trailblazer in terms of women's rights. She's an outsider by birth and an insider by resume. It would take a formidable politician to be able to use both of those qualities to maximum advantage. (If she combined her background with her husband's natural political skillz, we'd likely wake up next November to find her Empress Of The Universe.) And she is not that pol. Not yet, anyway. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next Tuesday.
Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.
