Clinton should be the default candidate for Powell. Yet Powell says of Hillary, “I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect.” The retired four-star general describes Mrs. Clinton as “a 70-year person [sic] with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still dicking bimbos at home (according to the NYP).”
The many obvious jokes about Slick Willie aside, Powell’s characterizations of Hillary are potentially politically significant. But those who focus on his correct analysis of Clinton as tremendously ambitious and greedy are missing the point. The truly devastating descriptor is “not transformational.”
In my lifetime, the only less transformational candidate than Hillary Clinton — and this is a close call — was George H.W. Bush. But Bush was running in a peacetime year that notched 4.2 percent GDP growth; being a status quo candidate was an asset rather than the enormous liability it is today. Instead of transformation, Hillary Clinton stands for raising the taxes Barack Obama has raised, socializing the health care system Obama has socialized, deeper entanglements in Middle Eastern wars that Americans have long been weary of, and a raft of stale, failed ideas that litter the recent and not-so-recent Progressive past.
In politics, as in financial markets and so much else in life, what is both interesting and important is what is changing and, by extension, how to cause change.
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