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In fact, Destruction reads more like an exercise in public relations. Clinton is not a representative of the establishment, Bordo argues, but has consistently been a progressive. If conservatives hadnt vilified her in the 90sif Bernie Sanders hadnt run against hershe would have defeated Donald Trump.

Its a fragile argument that relies heavily on scapegoats. Chief among them are Millennials. Young women disliked Clinton, Bordo argues, because they werent around for the GOPs character assassination of her in the 90s, and did not realize how unfairly she had often been portrayedor understand the sexism she had to overcome. They hadnt experienced a decade of culture wars in which feminists efforts to bring histories of gender and race struggle into the educational curriculum were reduced to a species of political correctness, she insists. They didnt witness the complicated story of how the 1994 crime bill came to be passed or the origins of the super-predator label (not coined by Hillary and not referring to black youth, but rather to powerful, older drug dealers).

This is interesting language. Bordo does not attribute the crime bill to Bill Clinton; its as if this legislation appeared out of the void. And though Bordo is right that Hillary Clinton did not coin the term superpredator, she doesnt mention that Clinton certainly did use it to refer to children. Via Politifact, heres Clintons full quote: We need to take these people on. They are often connected to big drug cartels, they are not just gangs of kids anymore. They are often the kinds of kids that are called superpredatorsno conscience, no empathy.

Bordos revisionism is evident in her fixation on Bernie Sanders. According to Bordo, Sanders unfairly maligned Clinton for her establishment tendencies. Bordo does not acknowledge, however, that Clinton campaigned as a pragmatic realist and consciously sought the support of conservative defectors from the GOP, while Sanders ran as a more idealistic democratic socialist. This conflicts with Bordos portrayal of the candidate as a true leftist.

So do Clintons policies. Bordo insists that Clinton supported universal health care in 2016, which is only partly accurate. Clinton supported Medicaid expansion and the public option, but these policies arent as expansive as Sanderss commitment to Medicare for All. On the federal minimum wage, welfare, and foreign policy, she sat to Sanderss right. She supported a $12 minimum wage, with the small proviso that cities should be able to raise it higher if they choose. And she had a long-standing record of support for American military intervention abroada tough sell to young voters jaded by endless war. These are facts Bordo chooses to ignore.

Bordo commits the same error in her treatment of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Lewinsky, she writes, has steadfastly insisted that there was nothing abusive (or even disrespectful) about Bill Clintons behavior. This misconstrues Lewinskys statements. In a 2014 piece for Vanity Fair, Lewinsky called the relationship consensual but also wrote, My boss took advantage of me. These assertions arent contradictory; many women could apply the same language to their own experiences. But Bordo twists Lewinskys words in order to cast both Clintons as victims of a rabid press. In reality, both retained substantial influence and privilege while Lewinsky suffered lasting vilification. Power protects itself. Bordo, who teaches gender studies, must know this.

But shes uninterested in interrogating the implications of Clintons power. Her argument that Clinton is a consistent progressive cant survive the admission that Clinton has made many missteps in her long career and has had to own, as she put it herself, many hard choices. Its incompatible with the fiction shes created: Hillary-the-revolutionary, to counter Hillary-the-establishment-elitist. The result is incoherent. Clinton is either a uniquely qualified candidate, or an easy target for uninformed millennials. She cant be both.

In the process of canonizing Clinton, Bordo infantilizes her. As first lady, Clinton obviously did not pass the crime bill or welfare reform, but she publicly supported both. Was she Bills puppet? Thats an unlikely role for an intelligent and accomplished woman. We should instead assume that Clinton said what she said because she believed it. Opinions change, but if would-be presidents choose to evolve they must expect to do so in public. Voters were right to question her about her old statements. They werent wrong to find her wanting. They were forming their opinions of the candidates by learning about their political commitments. Bordo does not.

But Bordos book is useful in one sense. It crystallizes an emerging tendency in liberal discourse: the notion that critics of Hillary Clinton are either trolls or naive children. Bordo makes much of Bernie Brosloud, male Sanders supporters who, she says, harassed Clinton supporters at rallies and abused female reporters on Twitter. The examples she cites are certainly rude (one allegedly called a Clinton supporter a lying shitbag) but this is a thin argument weakened further by her revisionism. She slams Sanders himself for his uncharacteristically mild response to the tweets. He never criticized the misogyny in their attacks on Clinton, she writes. This is flatly inaccurate: Sanders called them disgusting and told the press, Look, anybody who is supporting me that is doing the sexist things iswe dont want them. I dont want them.

To Bordo, rude Twitter users prove Sanderss inadequate commitment to the left. Bordo never asks if her one-sided framing is evidence that she lives in a bubble, and what a telling oversight. Female Sanders supporters would have told her that Clinton backers are also guilty of online harassmentand that the label Bernie Bro has been deployed to erase the very existence of left-wing women, drowning out valid critiques of Clintons platform. Its red-baiting by another name.

Millennials are not children, either. Ranging in age from 18 to 35, many recall Clintons tenures as senator, 2008 candidate, and secretary of state with clarity. Many fought in the Iraq War she supported. Others demanded marriage equality long before her political evolution on that matter. Still more struggled to afford education and health care while she cast herself as the great pragmatist in 2016: Single-payer health care, she told voters, will never, ever come to pass. Nevertheless, most millennials voted for her last November. If this does not satisfy the nations Susan Bordos, they are not to blame.

Bordos objection seems to be that anyone opposed Clinton at all, even from the left. What she does not graspand is seemingly not interested in graspingis that Clintons critics from the left were not opposing a caricature of her as some kind of right-wing political operator. We opposed Clinton-the-hawk and Clinton-the-means-tester. Our objection was about politics, not personality. Similarly, we do not reject the feminism of Bordo and Clinton because of its ideological rigidity, as Bordo suggests. We reject it because it is insufficient. America was not already great. Our lives are proof.

Destruction offers no real lessons for Democrats. Its a hagiography, written to soothe a smarting party. That is precisely why they must ignore it: There is no path forward that does not account for past mistakes. Hillary Clintons destruction was at least partly her own making, and if Democrats want to start winning elections its time they saw the truth.

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The Deification of Hillary Clinton - New Republic

President Hillary Clinton, DAlternative Universe. Photo-Illustration: Daily Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

Imagine what the political world would look like for Republicans had Hillary Clinton won the election. Clinton had dragged her dispirited base to the polls by promising a far more liberal domestic agenda than Barack Obama had delivered, but she would have had no means to enact it. As the first president in 28 years to take office without the benefit of a Congress in her own partys hands, shed have been staring at a dead-on-arrival legislative agenda, all the low-hanging executive orders having already been picked by her predecessor, and years of scandalmongering hearings already teed up. The morale of the Democratic base, which had barely tolerated the compromises of the Obama era and already fallen into mutual recriminations by 2016, would have disintegrated altogether. The 2018 midterms would be a Republican bloodbath, with a Senate map promising enormous gains to the Republican Party, which would go into the 2020 elections having learned the lessons of Trumps defeat and staring at full control of government with, potentially, a filibuster-proof Senate majority.

Instead, Republicans under Trump are on the verge of catastrophe. Yes, they are about to gain a Supreme Court justice, no small thing, a host of federal judges, and a wide array of deregulation. Yet they are saddled with not only the most unpopular president at this point in time in the history of polling, but the potential for a partywide collapse, the contours of which they have not yet imagined. The failure of the Republican health-care initiative was a sobering moment, when their early, giddy visions of the possibilities of full party control of government gave way to an ugly reality of dysfunction, splayed against the not-so-distant backdrop of a roiled Democratic voting base. They have ratcheted back their expectations. But they have not ratcheted them far enough. By the time President Trump has left the scene, what now looks like a shambolic beginning, a stumbling out of the gate, will probably feel like the good old days.

The Republican Party recovered from its cratering under the Bush administration by having the good fortune to lose control of the White House at precisely the moment that a global financial crisis began to inflict deep, ruinous pain upon the public. They used that backlash to gain control of Congress and stymie Obamas agenda, especially any measures to hasten the recovery or patch up Obamacare, frustrating his supporters. A sense of how deeply the GOPs position depended upon not holding the White House can be seen in public support for Obamacare. The unpopularity of the law has been the bedrock of the Republican strategy for nearly eight years. Republican control of government has made it popular.

Health care presents the party with an especially acute dilemma, forcing them to choose between promises they made to the public (lower premiums, lower deductibles, protections for sick people) and conservative ideological commitments that make them impossible. But it is by no means unique. Trump won the presidency by running a campaign that went far beyond the usual sunshine every president sells on the campaign trail. Trumps populist vision collapsed every policy dilemma into a simple question of negotiating skill that he could solve easily and painlessly. Trump has few clear paths to bolster his popularity while holding together his partisan base. Building the wall will be difficult and time-consuming. Renegotiating Nafta in a dramatically favorable way, as Michael Grunwald explains, is probably impossible. Republican standbys like cutting taxes for the rich and loosening regulations on Wall Street and greenhouse gases are feasible, but all deeply unpopular. All those achievements would also be easily reversible in a way Obamas biggest policy accomplishments were not. The tax cuts will almost certainly have to expire automatically after a decade. Trumps deregulatory agenda will be reversed by the next Democratic president.

Speaking of Obamas policy accomplishments, heres the best argument youll see on why his victories will not be so easily erased.

Trump mortgaged everything to win the election by making promises that he lacked any remotely practical plan to fulfill. The gains for him and his party will be scant, and the political costs of obtaining them high.

Trump could try to break with his party to sign popular bipartisan bills to patch up Obamacare, reform taxes in a way that does not help the rich, and build up infrastructure. But this would cost him the Republican lockstep support he needs to quash investigations into his corruption and campaign ties to Russia. Even a shrewd politician would have difficulty navigating the box in which Trump finds himself trapped.

And Trump is not a shrewd politician. A string of horrifying leaks has depicted a man far too mentally limited to do his job competently. The president is too ignorant of policy he simply agrees with whomever he spoke with last to even conduct basic policy negotiations with friendly members of Congress who want him to succeed. Nor does Trump know enough to even identify competent people to whom he can delegate his work. Hes a rank amateur who listens and delegates to other amateurs. (In a normal administration, the hilariously broad portfolio charged to his political novice son-in-law would be seen not as a joke but as a crisis.)

And all of this assumes a relatively straight-line political path. Trump has not yet faced a crisis that isnt of his own making, as every presidency does with regularity. Trumps partisan opponents cannot be gleeful at the fallout from an erratic, uninformed president and an understaffed Executive branch trying to manage a major calamity. Partisan politics in a two-party system is a zero-sum exercise. But the world is not a zero-sum place. One Republican staffer, dismayed by Trumps flailing, told Ezra Klein, If we get Gorsuch and avoid a nuclear war, a lot of us will count this as a win.

Avoiding nuclear war should be understood as shorthand for a long list of national disasters that could ensue from Trumps incompetent leadership pandemics, wars, natural-disaster response that would be terrible for the country as a whole and also terrible for the Republican Party. The damage could last a long time.

The last Republican presidency failed so spectacularly it created a generational chasm. Young voters, who mostly followed the same pattern as their elders before George W. Bush, have broken heavily Democratic in every election since 2004. The 2016 election showed slight signs of erosion in the pattern when white voters under 30 supported Trump, 4843. That is far smaller than the margin by which older whites flocked to Trump, and also far smaller than the margins Republicans will need to sustain among white voters to stay competitive nationally. As the white proportion of the electorate continues to shrink, Republicans will need to either improve among minorities or else steadily increase their share of the white vote, which currently hovers around 60 percent.

But the experience of Trump as president has reversed whatever small momentum the party had gained by 2016. Voters under 30 disapprove of his performance by margins exceeding two-to-one. My recent magazine story describes Trumps strategy of dividing the country along racial lines, in a way that would allow his party to claim an ever-growing share of the white vote. But the issues Trump hopes to use to attract younger whites to him instead repel them. In the CNN survey, about three-fourths of white Millennials opposed the border wall and about three-fifths rejected the temporary seven-nation immigration ban, explains Ron Brownstein. In the Pew survey, both Millennials overall and young whites were also more likely than any other age group to say the United States benefits from increasing racial and ethnic diversity, more likely to say they personally knew a Muslim, and least likely to say American Muslims were sympathetic to extremism.

The power of ethnonationalism, which I tried to communicate in the story, is that it manipulates the most base and emotionally accessible ideas about politics. But that power is also a source of danger to the party that tries to weaponize it: If it backfires, it activates equally powerful emotions against it. And while the fight to preserve the American ideal from Trumps ethnonationalism is hardly assured, there is every sign it will backfire.

Michael Antons now-iconic essay, The Flight 93 Election, made the case for Trump as a desperation gamble. (Hence the metaphor to a hijacked airline flight whose passengers had to choose a desperate and probably doomed fight over certain death.) Anton, now a staffer in Trumps administration, saw another four years of Democratic presidencies as the end of white America and conservative America. Most Republicans even those, like Anton, deeply suspicious of Trump ultimately agreed. Almost the entire GOP decided its hatred or fear of Clinton overrode their misgivings about their own nominee, and, with varying levels of enthusiasm, supported Trump. They brought disaster upon their country, but as a small measure of compensatory justice, they have also brought it upon their party. By the time Trump has departed the Oval Office, they will look longingly at a staid, boxed-in Clinton presidency as a road not taken.

This Golden Revival of Girls Is Notable Mostly for Putting All Four Girls in the Same Scene

A Brief Fact Check of Trumps Claim to Have Enjoyed 13 Weeks of Historic Success

The strikes would likely kill Russian soldiers and mark 180-degree shift in the White Houses policy towards Syria.

The House district represented by Mike Pompeo looked unassailable just days ago. No more.

It has not been successful or 13 weeks.

The president is reportedly weighing military action in Syria.

Its been tried, and it didnt work the first time.

The Trump administration has assembled a long list of popular, left-wing policies that it has shown no intention of actually trying to pass.

Its the Night of the Long Knives for the fine-tuned machine.

The long-awaited GOP move to force confirmation of Neil Gorsuch and future nominees by a simple majority has finally happened.

The boats dont yet have names, so the citys second-graders are tasked with picking them.

And in the process, ensures its published on news sites across the world.

Nunes will leave the gig to spend more time defending himself against ethics charges.

The presidents eldest son says the politics bug bit him.

To prepare for his meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump is relying on the expertise of his son-in-law, an oil executive, and a 93-year-old man.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights calls it ISISs largest mass killing of 2017.

It hurt the Democrats in the short run. But new polling confirms that the ACA gave the left a permanent advantage in the health-care debate.

Hes been clashing with Jared Kushner, and the President Bannon meme is said to be getting to Trump.

Making evidence-free accusations has worked out pretty well for him, so he probably wont.

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Before This Is Over, Republicans Are Going to Wish Hillary Clinton Won - New York Magazine

President Trump accused longtime NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell of being a Democratic activist.

In an interview with the New York Times published Wednesday, Trump referred to an interview Mitchell conducted the previous day on MSNBC with Susan Rice, the former national security adviser in the Obama administration.

"Take a look at what's happening," Trump said, referring to revelations about Rice's alleged role in the unmasking of Trump's associates in intelligence reports. "I mean, first of all her performance was horrible yesterday on television even though she was interviewed by Hillary Clinton's P.R. person, Andrea Mitchell."

His broadside against Mitchell is nearly a repeat of what White House social media director Dan Scavino previously said about the interview.

On Twitter, Scavino called Mitchell a Democratic "PR person."

During the interview, Rice denied reports she was involved in leaking information about Trump's associates who were caught up in incidental U.S. surveillance of foreign targets, and she said there was no political motivation in requesting that their identities be revealed to former Obama administration officials.

In his interview with the Times, Trump said it was the "biggest" story.

NBC and MSNBC have not returned a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.

Also from the Washington Examiner

U.S. launched more than 50 Tomahawk missiles at an air field in Syria.

04/06/17 9:19 PM

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Trump: NBC's Andrea Mitchell is 'Hillary Clinton's PR person' - Washington Examiner

In this Oct. 26, 2016, file photo, Chelsea Clinton speaks in Cincinnati.(Photo: John Minchillo, AP)

Will Hillary Clinton run for public office again? Her daughter, Chelsea, doesn't think so.

The younger Clinton appeared Tuesday on CBS This Morning to promote her bookIt's Your World: Get Informed, Get Inspired and Get Going, but the conversation veered toward her mother's political past and future.

"Oh, I have no idea," Clinton said when asked whether her mother would run again. "I dont think so. Ithink right now shes focused on her book. Shes focused, thankfully, on her grandchildren. Shes focused on what she can do to help support work that shes been engaged in for longer than Ive been alive, around children, around women, around families."

While Hillary Clinton has recently said that she wants to "come out of the woods," Chelsea Clinton interpreted this as her mother wanting to encourage people to remain engaged and to continue supporting progressive causes and organizations such as Planned Parenthood.

When asked whether she thought Russia interfered with the election and prevented her mother from winning, Clinton replied that she believed there were still many questions surrounding the situation.

"We deserve those answers," she said.

Clinton also brushed off questions about her own political future and having "politics in her DNA."

"No. No. No. No," she said when asked about whether she would consider running.

She noted that she was lucky to support the people who represented her now, from her councilwoman to her senators.

"I think to run for public office, though, a few things have to be true," she said. I think you have to have a clear vision of what you would do in a given job. I think you have to have a clear sense that you're the best person for that job."

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Chelsea Clinton doesn't think Hillary will run again - USA TODAY

Of course, Hillary Clinton is back. I am convinced she will run for the presidency as many times as it takes to win -- even if she is still being wheeled through the streets of Iowa at 108, kept alive by robotics and a refusal to surrender.

And even though the shock of Trump's election victory is receding as we become more involved in just how bad he is at governing, for Clinton it will never ebb as the most stunning rebuke possible. Hillary Clinton was beaten by Donald J Trump. That is like losing the Oscar for best picture to "Police Academy VI." After that kind of humiliation, most people would quit politics and go live in a cabin. Not Hillary. She still needs us to remember who she is.

This is typical of politicians. To succeed in this game you need to be sensitive enough to need to be loved but shallow enough to weather the hate. Trump is an extreme version of this. He appears to feel criticism deeply and yet he also invites it. Perhaps it's better to be talked about horribly than not at all.

And, really, what's wrong with this? Like Hillary, these statesmen all have experience to share, wisdom to impart. As the country sails into uncertain waters under Captain Trump, doesn't it make sense to stop and listen to the views of Hillary Clinton -- an intellectually gifted former secretary of state, no less?

No. In this instance, no. And the reason is quite simply that it's too soon. Too soon since Hillary Clinton lost the election and gave the White House to Trump -- because, regardless of what strengths Trump might have had, 2016 was ultimately an election for the Democrats to lose.

I have no doubt that almost any other candidate could have beaten Trump. Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Alec Baldwin, Big Bird. It turns out that the one candidate who could lose was Hillary.

There is a post-politics role for Clinton, but it cannot be just yet. Her party needs a period in which to separate from her memory -- to rebuild, find new candidates, reestablish its identity and delink itself from the entire Clinton philosophy.

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Hillary Clinton, it's too soon - CNN