Of course, Mrs. Clinton and President Obama are not interchangeable, but she identified entirely with and was the chief executor of his foreign policy for four years, and is glued to him like a limpet now. It is all part of the practice, clearer each day, that there is no defense for, and comparatively little serious media criticism of, this long, cliquish incumbency that has produced disasters in every policy area for 20 years. With Mrs. Clinton, from Whitewater and the White House travel office, through Benghazi, the squalor of the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play casino and the e-mail debacle, it is always deny, prevaricate, “short-circuit” (i.e. lie), and then say it’s old news — “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

There was something in the “deplorables” comment that went beyond the familiar hauteur of left and right and profoundly rankled. What Mrs. Clinton was deploring was the ingratitude to the ruling elite of these bumptious unwashed, the updated dismissal of the gun-toting, churchgoing (Republican) rabble that so irritated Obama eight years ago. This wasn’t just good-natured criticism of the wrongheaded supporters of an opponent, or FDR’s cunning assault on nonexistent culprits as “money-changers,” “economic royalists,” “warmongers.” etc. This was Empress Hillary emptying the contents of her chamber pot out the palace window onto the heads of those described in the phrase “We the people.” The entire complacent incumbent Washington leadership are inviting the same people to give them a bloodless trip to the electoral guillotine. More-unexpected events have overtaken office-holders and office-seekers less deserving of such a fate.