One On the Mat, Two Down For the Count

Clintonian Triangulation Comes Full Circle

If Hillary goes down, so does Bill.

The most enjoyable aspect of watching the HMS Hillary take on water is the prospect that Bill -- and his cult of personality -- will go down with the ship too.

Bill Clinton has been stumping for his wife on the Iowa hustings, framing the election as a referendum on his tenure as president. Last month in Muscatine (during the same speech in which he falsely claimed to have opposed the Iraq war from the beginning), he told the assembled Democrats that HMS Hillary could transport America "back to the future."

Last summer, when he first started hawking Hillary like a door-to-door salesman, he told a crowd: "I know, some people say, 'Look at them. They're old. They're sort of yesterday's news.' ... "Well," Slick Willie said, grinning, "yesterday's news was pretty good."

Indeed, Hillary's entire campaign has been grounded in her experience in the Clinton administration of the 1990s, even though that experience mostly involves designing a failed healthcare plan and unsuccessfully hectoring her husband to move to the left. Still, as New York Times editorial writer Adam Cohen noted in a column last week, it was her decision to make the choice between her and Obama a "referendum on a decade."

So if Hillary Clinton loses the race for the nomination -- heck, even if she just loses the Iowa caucuses -- I hope to see this headline somewhere, perhaps in the New York Post: "America to Clinton(s): We're Just Not That Into You."

The rush of schadenfreude would be so overwhelming...

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http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-goldberg18dec18,0,532645.column?coll=la-home-commentary