Hillary Clinton, Barbed and Bellicose

Frank Bruni, NYT
AUG. 11, 2014

The other night, a prominent Democrat I know made the craziest statement.

“I don’t think Hillary’s going to run,” he proclaimed, silencing the room. He might as well have said that he’d just spotted Bigfoot pilfering rhubarb from the White House vegetable garden or that Arnold Schwarzenegger was in line to play Lear on Broadway. (“Cordelia, I’ll be baaaaack.”) He was humming some kind of loony tune.

His evidence?

“She seems tired,” he said, and that’s when all of us cracked up. Oh, yeah, she seems positively exhausted. That explains the juggernaut of a book tour, the CNN town hall and all the other interviews, including the doozy with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, which I’ll turn to in a bit. If there was nap time in there, I missed it.

Without yet becoming president, she has ascended to some level of saturation exposure that’s above and beyond omnipresent. At this point she’s practically ambient. Her “inevitability” may boil down to the fact that no one can imagine a political ecosystem — nay, a habitable environment! — without her. When it comes to the Clintons, we apparently have two choices. Put them on Rushmore, or put them back in the White House.

And yet.

(More here.)