Hillary? They Call Her the Wagon Lady

Why do they call Hillary Clinton "The Wagon Lady"?

Because she has so much baggage that she needs a covered wagon to haul it around.

This is not a bad joke. It's a true and very sad statement. Very sad for those of us who really would like to see a woman be president.

The hard truth is, she ain't going to make it, folks.

We are all so caught up in the newest GOP cavalcade, Donald Trump shoving cream pies in the face of anybody who comes near him. We're all so caught up in this laugh-a-minute that we are losing sight of the fact that the show on the Democrats' side is not very encouraging, at least as far as the supposed front runner.

Hillary Clinton has some serious disabilities as a candidate. She is awkward. She is stiff. She comes across as a phony, too well-rehearsed, too rolling-the-big-eyes. This last problem is really a put-off. Mitt Romney was the guy at the cocktail party that you kept trying to avoid. Hillary is the hostess who comes down the staircase trailing her hand on the banister, beaming over-wide, and saying "Dahlings!"

You just want to go puke.

If she is the nominee, I will have to vote for her. But a lot of other people won't. Democrats are great at staying home.

People don't trust her, according to the polls. And that's not solely because she comes across as phony. Her actual behavior in office and on the campaign trail and as First Lady leaves a bad taste in peoples' mouths. What was she up to? With her own computer server? With those maybe-classified e-mails? With Whitewater? With the billing hours from her years at the Rose law firm? With grabbing  health care reform away from the Congress in 1993 and holding closed-door meetings on it?  I don't think these were criminal moves. They were just politically stupid.

"The appearance of propriety is as important as propriety itself."  This was one of my mother's sayings. Like all mothers she was absolutely correct. Grace Daley Kamer really did know whereof she spoke. When she was a kid in a Chicago Catholic school, young Richard Daley was always trying to kiss her on the grounds they were "kissing cousins". She cut him cold: "You'll not kiss me, Richard Daley! You're a bad boy. The nuns caught you smoking!" They were of course collaterally related but their strongest relationship was the bond of politics. The Daleys of Chicago were all political. They were Irish. My mother's father ran political campaigns among his other jobs, such as being chief of the detective bureau of the Chicago police. His brother James Daley was an alderman. My mother grew up at a dinner table where political talk came right along with the corned beef and cabbage

Obviously Hillary Clinton did not get this kind of coaching as a youngster. She keeps making things appear worse than they probably are. She is, as anybody's mother might say, her own worst enemy.

Rule number one: when caught stumbling, admit it. The computer server issue was something most people don't give a damn about. But she's made it into an ongoing story. She keeps TALKING ABOUT IT! People don't really understand the story, but the fact that it keeps going on seems to suggest it's important. She should've just said, "The security computer people thought it was a good idea. I'm not knowledgeable about computer servers. If it was a mistake, I sure do apologize. Can you explain to me the harm done because I really don't know about computer servers."

After all, Chris Christie got away with saying he didn't know anything about lane closures over that bridge. That's all he said: "I don't know anything about it." His closest aides did it, but he didn't know about it? How much easier to say you don't understand what some computer guys were doing.

Many people can dig that. Nobody knows about computer servers except young people. And they won't vote in the primaries or they will vote for Bernie Sanders. But the reliable voters, the seniors who should be Hillary voters, would just say, "What's a computer server? A guy who comes to fix it?" And the young voters would look at Hillary's age and say, "Of course, she doesn't understand it. My grandma won't even use a computer. Poor old darlings."  (I can say these things. I'm a grandma.)

But Hillary doesn't acknowledge, plead ignorance and move on. Instead she gets all huffy. She acts like she's being attacked by the press. John Kennedy made them his friends. She bridles at the mere sight of them. Hilary, honey, get this:  The press has a right to ask questions. It's their duty. You aren't privileged.

Rule number two: If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen. If you can't stand to be questioned or criticized, why in hell do you want to be president?

Rule number three: If you run for president, be sure you have a good reason for doing it. I can't figure out why Hillary Clinton wants to be president. She has no message. Sure, she just cobbled together stuff about climate control, promising to go beyond Obama's targets. Why is she running against Obama's record? All of a sudden she's an environmentalist? No, she's not. We environmentalists weren't born yesterday. We haven't seen her around our causes, and her husband did nothing about the environment until literally the last moments of his presidency. Absent her ability to tell us why she's running, she comes across as doing it because she wants it for herself. This is a double risk, because she ran before and lost but is coming back for a second. That more than suggests a very strong, very personal desire. Maybe that's her only reason for running. It isn't enough, Hillary.

Hillary hasn't learned that she cannot be everything: health care expert, computer expert, etc. Whatever it is, she jumps on it and tries to explain it, command it, be the boss.

What she needs to be good at is political campaigning. Sadly, she is terrible at it. Is it too late to start learning now? She learned nothing in 2008. How she's going to learn now? We can't afford to lose in 2016, and Hillary is a loser. People just don't like or trust her.  Being a bad candidate is even worse than being a former Socialist. In this very strange political year, it looks to this old campaigner like former Socialist Bernie Sanders is a very good candidate. Oddly enough, this old gal—me, not Hillary— has come around to thinking we could win with a New York Socialist Jew. I happen to love New York Socialist Jews, but ordinarily those qualities would automatically mark a guy as a loser in American politics. Plus he's almost as old as I am. Nevertheless, of all people, Hillary Clinton has been the one to convince me to go with Bernie.

And not just by default. I think Bernie Sanders is a winner. I'll explain that another time.