Could Hillary Clinton be the next president of the United States?

By David McElroy · September 17, 2011

When’s the last time a first-term president lost re-nomination by his own party? I can’t think of a time it’s ever happened, but some people are starting to suggest that Barack Obama is so unpopular that Hillary Clinton has a shot at the Democratic nomination for next year. Are they crazy or could there be something to this?

It’s far too early in the process for me to make predictions about who’s going to win, so I’m not ready to come down hard on either side of the discussion. But the fact that I’m seeing it mentioned so frequently is a strong indication of Obama’s possible electoral weakness right now.

When it was just Dick Cheney suggesting that Clinton run against Obama, you could write it off as a Republican eager to sabotage an incumbent Democratic president. You could also say that James Carville was just living up to his “ragin’ Cajun” image when he wrote blunt advice to Obama about what he had to do to survive.

But when the New York Times has a story quoting Democratic congressmen questioning Obama’s ability to be re-elected, you know the president is in trouble. Perhaps the most important piece of this puzzle came Friday, though, when Bloomberg reported that Clinton is the most popular politician in the country at the moment, with nearly two thirds of voters saying they have a favorable view of her and a full third of voters saying the country would have been better off if she had been elected three years ago instead of Obama. The same poll showed that Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to 45 percent, which is the lowest of his presidency.

Our own regular commenter JB made his prediction in the comments of another story this week that Clinton would be the next president. (Spoiler: He doesn’t care for the woman.) Is he right? I don’t think the odds favor that prediction yet — and I’m not ready to make my own actual predictions — but it’s something nobody would have even talked about a year ago. (You can also read JB’s new blog here if you’d like to follow him, as I do.)

So will we be facing another Clinton presidency in another 14 months or so? I’d say the odds aren’t good for Clinton, but the fact we’re talking about it as a serious possibility might just show how weak Obama’s chances are. At this point, I would put my money on the generic GOP nominee as the likely winner, but they’re so unimpressive that some people will be looking for another choice.

If someone put a gun to my head today and demanded that I make a prediction, I’d say Rick Perry has the best shot — even though I’ve made it clear that I don’t care for the man. With that said, I can see Clinton having a shot, which would have been unthinkable not long ago. The times are crazy and unstable.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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