Hillary's Date with Destiny

“There is,” Shakespeare’s Brutus said to Cassius, “a tide in the affairs of men.”

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

Such, I suspect, were the musings of Hillary Rodham Clinton last night as she watched the election returns from a safe and distant perch in an East Asian hotel, and her thinking was no doubt in accord with what was going through the mind of William Jefferson Clinton as well.

As expected, judgment day came on the first Tuesday in November, and the Democrats suffered an historic defeat. In the House, they lost at least sixty seats, and they lost at least six seats in the Senate as well. Their share in the overall vote fell well short of that accorded the Republicans.

Of course, the liberal media will go to great lengths to deny the obvious – first, that this constituted a fully conscious repudiation of the agenda pursued by the administration of Barack Obama and by its Democratic allies in Congress and, second, that William Daley – former Secretary of Commerce, brother of the Mayor of Chicago, and mastermind of the Daley machine – was correct when, on Christmas eve, he warned his fellow Democrats that “the political dangers of this situation could not be clearer,” explaining, “Either we plot a more moderate, centrist course or risk electoral disaster not just in the upcoming midterms but in many elections to come.” But no one will credit their spin, and Democrats everywhere will quietly and privately begin to rethink their relationship with Barack Obama.

Those Democrats who survived the Republican tsunami and retained their House seats this year may be apt to suppose that they will survive in 2012 as well. But Senators up for re-election in that year will be inclined to think other thoughts.

Eight of the Democratic Senators whose terms will come to an end in 2012 represent states that John McCain won in 2008, and the same statistics apply in 2014. If Scott Brown could win in Massachusetts, they and many of their less vulnerable colleagues will surely think, if Ron Johnson could win in Wisconsin, if Mark Kirk could win in Illinois, and if Dino Rossi could pull off a tie in Washington, what might that mean for me?

President Obama holds most of the crucial cards. But he is by no means invulnerable. Even before the Democratic Party suffered severe losses yesterday, the polling data suggested that 51% of the voting public hoped that he would be a one-term President and that 47% of Democrats wanted someone to challenge him in the primaries.

He is, moreover, caught between a rock and a hard place. If he gives way to John Boehner – if he acquiesces in an extension of the Bush tax cuts, if he accepts severe cuts in the federal budget, if he gives way to a repeal of Obamacare – the left will turn on him with a vengeance. If he refuses to give way on an occasion in which the Republicans have been given a clear mandate from the voters, the opposition tide will continue to grow – especially, if (as is inevitable) unemployment remains stubbornly high.

This Hillary Clinton undoubtedly knows – and anything that escapes her will surely not escape her husband, who is as canny as he is wayward. President Obama will undoubtedly attract opposition in the primaries, and unhappiness within the party will be sufficient that he will lose at least some of those contests. Moreover, even if he is renominated, those who oppose him in 2012 will be better-positioned for the nomination struggle in 2016 than those who remain on the sidelines, especially those who – how shall I say it? – are getting a bit long in the tooth.

Had he taken my advice, had he deigned to attend Chelsea Clinton’s wedding, and to ask of her father a favor on the one day in which, as everyone knows, an Arkansan can deny no man’s request, President Obama might now be sitting pretty with Hillary signed up as his next vice-presidential nominee. But he did not grace the Clintons with his presence; he has announced that Joe Biden will once again be his running mate, describing his original choice in this regard as “the single best decision I have made“; and Bill Clinton in recent weeks has gone out of his way, as he ostentatiously put it, to make at least one campaign “stop for everybody that helped Hillary run for president.”

It is, of course, possible that Hillary Clinton so likes her present job that she no longer has any great desire to become President. But I doubt it. In October, 2009 – after I had suggested here, here, and here that the political tide had turned and that a realignment might be in the offing – I bet a small sum that the Democrats would take a shellacking in November, 2010, that in the aftermath the nation’s Secretary of State would resign from that office over a matter of principle, and that she would run for the Democratic nomination. It looks like a wiser bet with every passing day.