Time to rethink Hillary Clinton 2016

You may be wondering, to use eight other Clinton words that will reverberate for a long time: “What difference at this point does it make?” This difference: Although she says her 13 words “short-handed” her thinking, what weird thinking can they be shorthand for?

Yuval Levin, whose sharp thinking was honed at the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, is editor of the National Affairs quarterly and author of two books on science and public policy and, most recently, of “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.” He is one of conservatism’s most sophisticated and measured explicators, so his biting assessment of Clinton is especially notable:

“She is smart, tough and savvy and has a capacity to learn from failure and adjust. But . . . people are bored of her and feel like she has been talking at them forever. . . . She is a dull, grating, inauthentic, over-eager, insipid elitist with ideological blinders yet no particular vision and is likely to be reduced to running on a dubious promise of experience and competence while faking idealism and hope — a very common type of presidential contender in both parties, but one that almost always loses.”