According to a committeewoman in the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the fix is in for Hillary Clinton to be the Democrat Party’s presidential nominee. Speaking on the condition of anonymity, she spoke with the British tabloid the Daily Mail immediately following the Democrat debate in Las Vegas on Tuesday. She listed the women in key positions at the top of the DNC, including Debbie Waserman Schultz, Donna Brazile, and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, calling them a “female cabal” who have decided to make things easy for Clinton to win the party’s nomination. She said:
I haven’t heard anyone say we should make Hillary undergo a trial by fire. To the contrary, the women in charge seem eager, more and more, to have her skate into the general election…. I have nothing against women in politics. But it’s not healthy for the party if we get behind a woman [just] because she’s a woman, and risk having her implode after she’s nominated because she isn’t tested enough now.
The anonymous insider and tipster rattled off the names of those in control of the DNC, including vice chair Maria Elena Durazo, CEO Amy Dacey, and Reverend Leah Daughtry. Five out of the nine elected leaders of the DNC are women (including Schultz), along with a majority of the vice chairs of the various committees. The DNC has more women than men in elected positions, and females hold the party’s top executive roles including the DNC’s chair, three of its five vice chairs, and several top public relations people.
The “cabal” decided last summer to limit the number of “debates” in order to protect Clinton from making a fatal gaffe and to keep Joe Biden from becoming a threat to her campaign. In 2007 and 2008, the Democrat Party’s primary candidates were subjected to a grueling schedule of 27 debates, but this time there will be only six.
Said the anonymous committeewoman to the Daily Mail, “Is this a secret? I mean, all the energy around Hillary right now, and we’re paring back the number of debates? That’s going to give her a lot fewer opportunities to screw up.”
This was clear to the editorial staff at New Hampshire’s Union Leader: “On the Republican side, primary voters have 16 candidate options and 11 debates to help them decide.… The Democratic primary voters are being muffled — on purpose — by a party elite that wants no one to disrupt Hillary Clinton’s path to the nomination.”
Assisting Clinton was the FBI’s refusal to submit to a judge’s order, and Joe Biden’s tossing off the Clinton e-mail scandal at Tuesday night’s debate. A month ago, Judge Emmet Sullivan ordered the State Department to connect with the FBI to see what information could be gleaned from Clinton’s e-mail server. The FBI rejected the judge’s demand: “At this time, consistent with long-standing Department of Justice and FBI policy, we can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation, nor are we in a position to provide additional information at this time.”
This conveniently snuffs out any investigation that might embarrass Clinton, or even cause her to be indicted. One problem out of the way.
During Tuesday night’s debate, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sealed shut any further conversation about her e-mails by exclaiming that “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” which brought a roar of approval from the partisan crowd. Another problem out of the way.
According to the Daily Mail, the debate “underscored the likelihood of a cakewalk coronation [of Clinton] unless she commits a serious unforced error, or finds herself indicted by the Obama administration’s Justice Department in connection with the email scandal.”
But all the backroom maneuvering by the DNC’s “cabal” might come to naught if the election model developed by the British news agency Reuters is accurate. The day after the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Reuters explained:
Elections are not mysterious events subject to the whimsy of unpredictable candidates and voters. They’re actually highly predictable, with a set of variables that influence outcomes in familiar ways. Because of that, we can say, with reasonable confidence, that a Republican will be moving into the White House in 2017.
Two major factors support the prediction, according to Reuters: A successor candidate from the same party is much less likely to win an election, especially if the incumbent suffers from a low voter approval rating. Said Reuters, “President Barack Obama’s approval ratings are too low to suggest a successor candidate [from his party] will take the White House.”
The Reuters model is based not just on the 25 U.S. presidential elections in the past 100 years, but on more than 450 elections from 35 countries. From that database, Reuters learned that candidates from the incumbent party are much less likely to win than if the incumbent himself were running again. Couple that with low approval ratings of the incumbent, and the candidate from his party has only a slim chance of succeeding the incumbent. That’s especially true in the present case:
Our model proves the power of presidential approval ratings. It determines that in order for a successor candidate [Clinton] to have better than even chances of winning, the sitting president must have an approval rating above 55 percent…. Because Barack Obama’s average approval rating is now at 45 percent, a successor candidate (i.e., Democrat) is unlikely to win
Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton then has one more thing to worry about: making a major gaffe in one of the remaining five so-called debates, getting indicted for her role in the e-mail scandal, and now, just being in the wrong party at the wrong time.
Photo: AP Images
A graduate of an Ivy League school and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at [email protected].
