Hillary Clinton unleashed the beast too soon
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Hillary Clinton should have read the glorious Hindu epic, the Mahabharata: It would have warned her not to throw her Ultimate Weapon – former President Bill Clinton – into the presidential race too soon. She made that mistake in 2008 when Bill’s ham-handed moves cost her the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
And now Hillary, surely the most self-destructive and unteachable major political figure since Richard Nixon himself – has made the same catastrophic mistake again: She unleashed Bill too soon. And he has buried her.
In the Mahabharata, there is an ultimate weapon: It is called the Brahmastra – a weapon so powerful that it should never be used, because it totally destroyed everything. Since Erich Von Daniken, Ancient Astronaut theorists have claimed the Brahmastra is a description of a nuclear weapon being detonated in the primeval past, and certainly the description of its effect sounds eerily like what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The description of the Brahmastra exploding is comparable to the use of former President Bill Clinton in a presidential campaign. The Old Master is so powerful he should never be used against fellow Democrats. But he is lethally effective against Republicans.
In the 2008 presidential campaign, the more Bill campaigned for Hillary against Barack Obama, the more support she lost within her own party, where she had reigned as uncrowned queen for the previous 16 years.
Yet in 2012, wheeled out and deployed against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Bill showed his old unerring touch. He devastated Romney with his great speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Along with Joe Biden’s utter evisceration of Rep. Paul Ryan, now reincarnated as Speaker of the House in the vice presidential debate – a possibly prophetic foretaste of what a Candidate Joe Biden might yet do to the Republican contender later this year – it was one of the decisive Tipping Points of the campaign.
The contrasting experiences of using Bill as a Brahmastra in 2008 and 2012 should have taught Hillary when to use him most effectively in 2016, but the Grand Strategy of presidential campaigns has never been her strong suit, to put it mildly.
Next: How Bill Has Cost Hillary Her Women’s Support Base.
Martin Sieff is a former senior foreign correspondent for The Washington Times and former Managing Editor, International Affairs for United Press International. Mr. Sieff is the author of “That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman’s Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs” (Wiley 2012) and “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East” (Regnery, 2008). He has received three Pulitzer Prize nominations for international reporting.