How much would it cost to remodel the mayor’s office at City Hall to make it look like the Oval Office? Can’t be more than a hundred thou, I’m thinking. Hillary could cover that with one four-minute speech to Goldman Sachs.
We as a nation are about to embark on a strange and difficult journey on Friday. We deserve the diverting entertainment that one last Clinton campaign would bring, even though we all know we’re not going to get it.
De Blasio is further left than Hillary is, more of a Sanders Democrat than a Clinton Democrat, but basic tribal partisanship requires that Republicans prefer him to her — even though his job approval among New York Republicans is, er, 17/80. She leads in every other meaningful demographic, even though Quinnipiac presented her challenge to de Blasio here as an independent candidacy, not as a Democratic primary challenge. That’d be an interesting rebranding by Hillary, the “pragmatic” Democrat who doesn’t quite fit into either party, who’ll govern New York as a Wall-Street-friendly center-leftist (which is what she is). But it’d be risky to divide Democrats that way in a general election when a Republican will be running too. It’s unlikely that the GOP nominee would pull enough votes to win a three-way race even if de Blasio and Hillary split the Democratic vote roughly evenly, but it’s totally possible that Republicans would vote en masse for de Blasio in the name of spiting Clinton. She’d need to knock him off the general-election ballot by beating him in a Democratic primary, where there are no Republican voters to cause mischief. Consolidate her party first, then win the general election easily.
I wrote about the idea of her running for mayor before but there was one question I didn’t consider. How would the world’s most famous New Yorker react? Would President Trump endorse de Blasio to spite her or endorse Hillary to seem magnanimous towards an old enemy? All he could do is hurt her, I think. If he backed de Blasio, people would shrug it off as a sign of lingering bad blood between Clinton and Trump. If he endorsed Clinton, though, liberals would use it as ammo to justify supporting de Blasio. Trump usually opts for maximum mischief so, yeah, he’d probably back Hillary. And then they’d feud for the next four years after she won.
In lieu of an exit question, via the Resurgent, here’s footage of a recent encounter between Clinton and de Blasio.
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