Can a One-Percenter Lead the Dems?

Does it strike you as an indication of a political party's robust vitality that in a country of more than 300 million people that party has just one likely nominee for president? Notwithstanding the fact that she has at her disposal nearly a billion dollars, she is 67 years old and stands accused of committing at least one felony. What country are we talking about, the old USSR? No, we are talking about the contemporary U.S. of A.

This is the condition in which the Democratic Party now finds itself, and it calls itself the party of youthful vigor. After Hillary Rodham Clinton, the next two candidates in line for her party's presidential nomination are 72-year-old Vice President, Joe Biden (ha-ha!), and a 65-year-old senator from Massachusetts whose Native-American heritage is widely viewed to be an opportunistic fiction and in some quarters a pretty good joke. After that there is a 73-year-old Socialist by the name of Bernie Sanders and the ex-governor of Maryland who benefits from being only 52 years of age — though last weekend, Baltimore, the city which he earlier presided over as mayor, erupted in racial rioting because of a police department whose strategies for policing are widely held to be brutal and devised by him.

Does anyone know how the Democratic Party fell into such a heap? Well for one thing it suffers from being the dubious beneficiary of the Taranto Principle. According to the Taranto Principle, first identified by the Wall Street Journal's James Taranto, the mainstream media's coddling of its pets — read its pets in the Democratic Party — encourages the pols' worst instincts: self-indulgence, eccentric behavior, arrogance and, in the Clintons' case, influence pedaling. According to a new book, "Clinton Cash" by Peter Schweizer, the Clintons have joined the fabled one percent selling influence to the highest bidder.

Viewed from the rationale precincts of the non-mainstream media, the Democratic Party is in a hell of a mess. Its labor unions have gone Luddite, socialist and, in some instances, pre-industrial. Its leavening of moderates hardly exists. Its conservatives died out long ago or became Republicans. The Democrats take great comfort when they are recognized by their amanuenses in the mainstream media as diverse, forward-looking and progressive. Yet they are really only party hacks wearing masks: Environmentalists! Feminists! The down-and-out of the working class! The bores from identity politics.

The reason Hillary is the only Democrat even dreamed of for the Democratic nomination in 2016 is that every promising national candidate that the Democrats were grooming to become their next Messiah was bumped off in the wave elections of 2010 and 2014. Those waves were Republican waves. The Democrats have been left with the ever youthful, ever energetic, ever so late-1960s Hillary and her now anile husband, Bill. So right now Hillary is the Democrats' candidate, assuming she is not indicted for destroying her 30,000 emails much like she destroyed or concealed her billing records back in the 1990s. By the way, how ever did those billing records disappear and then reappear in the White House after years of being subpoenaed? In the mid-1990s, an American Spectator reporter found a young man back in the Little Rock night dutifully burning Rose Law firm records. I would have thought that he burned them all.

It is reported that today's left-wing Democrats — their blood-shot eyes bulging, the veins in their heads throbbing — are unhappy with Hillary for continuing to gouge Wall Street and Hollywood for money. This is one of their issues with her, and it is going to get worse when all the details of Schweizer's book are divulged. Not only do the Clintons take money from Wall Street and Hollywood, but also they have taken donations from foreign entities, often foreign governments, occasionally hostile foreign governments. Supposedly, the Clintons have made enough money since leaving the White House — amid rumors of pardons pedaled and government property pilfered — to qualify as members of the left's hated one-percenters. How can the Democrats nominate a one-percenter to lead the party of the down and out? I say the Democratic left nominate an alternative to Hillary. How about Joe Biden, ha-ha?

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R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is founder and editor in chief of The American Spectator, a political and cultural monthly, which has been published since 1967. He's also the author of several books.