Why Hillary Rodham Clinton Should Not Run for President

Note:  Having a blog is most conducive to spouting off.  The opportunity to be heard, if by limited audience, comes close to inducing opinions that cry out to be expressed.  So it did not take long for me to create a post on foreign affairs--on the strife in the Middle East--and now one on US politics.

   While I voted for Obama, I was nonetheless a fan of Ms. Clinton and still am.  Still, I believe she should not run for president in 2016.  Were she to run and win, she would be over seventy years old when sworn into office.  She would be the oldest person to take on the presidency, even senior to Ronald Reagan who now has the record of being the oldest person at inauguration.  Granted that 70 is the new 62, say, there is virtually no chance that Ms. Clinton, were she to win, could capture a second term, making it highly probable that, if all went well, she would be in the White House for a single term.  Times have changed since genial and wily Reagan was able to age, not all so gracefully, in the Oval Office.

   While the Democrats should know all that, the Republicans surely do.  It is highly probable that the GOP establishment will be firmly in the leadership in 2016.  They know that Tea Partygoers will not elect a president and, whatever happens to the House and Senate this coming November, the powers-that-be will give their party a centrist cast—Republican centrist, to be sure.  For sure they will aim at mainstream voters and not at a right-wing fringe.  Accordingly, Ted Cruz will not be the candidate nor will Rand Paul.  Nor will his ill-tempered corpulence, “Chris” Christie, who should now be looking for a well-paying job for when his second term as New Jersey governor ends.  Nor will it be the thinly-veiled phony, Marco Rubio, who may nevertheless be able to look forward to a lengthy career in the Senate.

   The candidate of the Republicans may well be Jeb Bush (even his mother has withdrawn her reservations), who would be 64 at a January 2017 inauguration, an age that raises no issues at all.  If not Bush, some other Republican governor or former governor, between 45 and 65 years old.  The candidate will be a fresh face on that stage and a new voice and is likely to be someone who will know how to couch the Republican ideology in a more or less populist way.  There will be no talk about  those 47 percent of takers!

   And the fact that the voters will in all likelihood hear a new voice may well constitute an even greater handicap for Hillary Rodham Clinton than her age.  She has been on the national scene since her husband’s first campaign for the presidency.  Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, so, for at least twenty-two years, she has been in the public eye, very visibly for 12 years as First Lady, visibly as Senator from New York, immensely visibly as candidate in a very long primary for the presidency, and by no means invisible as Secretary of State. 

   I have no doubt that Ms. Clinton will have new and worthwhile things to say were she to run again for president, but she cannot change her voice and a visage.  However new her thoughts, her ideas, she will come across as spoken by a voice from the past.  She is unlikely to persuade enough voters that she should be the country’s leader, as the first quarter of the twenty-first century comes to a close.  For all those reasons, I repeat: Hillary Rodham Clinton should not be a candidate for president in 2016, but step down gracefully.

   And I have one more request.  Ms. Clinton should not wait too long to declare that she will not run.  She should be allowed six months of uncertainty about her intentions so as to reap the maximum benefits from her new book.  But no more.  It will take quite a bit of time for alternative Democratic candidates to emerge and to make themselves widely known, before one of them can effectively be chosen.  I will not now speculate as to who these potential candidates might be.  I will merely assert that there needs to be a period of sorting out, so that the next Democratic convention is in the best position to select a candidate who will bring another eight years in the White House to that party.