Hillary May Just Be Dumb

Hillary is losing her party's presidential nomination to a man who is not even a Democrat and to another man who has not yet entered the race. How can a candidate who began with such an enormous edge that twelve months ago she was deemed "inevitable" have fallen so far? The usual explanation is that the Clintons are too secretive, too paranoid, and too much like lawyers. Consider another possibility: Hillary may be dumb. We presume otherwise because she went to Ivy League schools and because she belonged to a prominent Little Rock law firm and because she has held a couple of important offices since her husband left the White House. But we all know the real source of her success: she has been Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for forty years.

Hillary's undergraduate degree was in political science, a major that requires nothing more of a student than slavish aping of the radical leftist positions of one's professors. Her admission to Yale Law School was during the heyday of affirmative action, when schools were desperate to find young women to balance the gender quotas. The jobs Hillary had out of law school were purely ideological positions, first as a staff attorney for the so-called "Children's Defense Fund" and as a member of the impeachment inquiry staff of the House Judiciary Committee at the time of Watergate. Hillary then tried to become a lawyer in the District of Columbia and took the bar exam for that jurisdiction. She failed, despite the fact that two thirds of those who took the exam passed. Soon thereafter, Hillary accepted Bill's wedding proposal and moved to Arkansas. Her first "real" job was with the Rose Law Firm, but did she "earn" that job the way most of us would have? Well, Hillary was hired a couple of months after her husband was sworn in as Arkansas attorney general. That continued to be where Hillary worked as her husband was elected again and again as governor of Arkansas. Hillary was rarely in court. Her role was that of a "rainmaker," an average sort of lawyer who can nevertheless bring in clients because of her connections. Hillary certainly had those connections. Her husband was either Arkansas attorney general or governor of Arkansas for 14 out of the 16 years from January 1977 to January 1993. Few doubt today that Hillary knew about her husband's behavior as a philanderer and sexual predator. Few doubt also that Hillary could have ruined her husband's career in one afternoon news conference. Why didn't she do that and then strike out on her own? One plausible explanation is that she felt like a very ordinary sort of person on her own. Since being first lady, what has Hillary done? She was elected almost by default as a Democrat to the Senate from New York, a state that last elected a Republican to the Senate in 1992, and then as Obama's secretary of state. Her books, of course, are ghostwritten, and her board memberships over the last few decades are meaningless gestures to the wife of a powerful husband. Hillary has shown in her life no serious intelligence at all. So might she not just be sort of…dumb? She is never unscripted, and the script she reads has been written by other people who are smart. Hillary almost never takes questions, and her responses to the few questions she condescends to answer are profoundly dull. Hillary's private email server was a decision that was not just sneaky, but also stupid. In fact, Hillary's imploding campaign is entirely the result of self-inflicted wounds. Leftism, of course, elevates dummies and whispers into the ears of these sock puppets that they are actually brilliant. Mouthing hoary leftist nostrums is always deemed terribly wise, and parroting the party line is invariably thought subtle and profound. Why would we suspect that Hillary would be the exception to the process of leftism dumping hapless mediocrities on America after pronouncing these people smart? More than most leftists, Hillary has made stupid mistake after stupid mistake. More than most, Hillary has fallen back on her spouse and her "experience" as first lady as proof that she is up to the job as president. One explanation is that Hillary is super-clever. A better explanation is she is not too bright.