New York magazine blogger Jonathan Chait sees Hillary Clinton as the “presumptive favorite” to become the next president of the United States, contending that “something serious would have to change in order to prevent a Clinton victory.” In a Sunday post, Chait offered six reasons for his belief. Most were at least somewhat objective and analytical; the last was nakedly ideological.
Chait placed his first four reasons under the headings “The Emerging Democratic Majority is real”; “No, youngsters are not turning Republican”; “Clinton isn't that unpopular”; and “Obama is trending up.” Reason #5 had to do with Chait’s skepticism regarding the familiar argument that voters will be reluctant to keep the same party in the White House for more than two terms. “The polarized electorate of today is a different place,” he wrote, “and voters may not act the same way as they used to. There are fewer swing voters, and therefore conditions like a third straight term…may not budge as many of them from their normal partisan habits.”
Here’s Chait’s final reason in its entirety (bolding added except for the first sentence, which was bolded in the original):
6. There's no alternative. All of the above brings us back to the central challenge facing Clinton. She cannot promise her supporters a dramatic change or new possibilities; she is personally too familiar, and the near certainty of at least one Republican-controlled chamber of Congress suggests continued legislative stalemate. Her worry is that ennui sets in among the base and yields a small electorate more like the kind that shows up at the midterms, which is an electorate Republicans can win.
The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics. There is only one choice for voters who want a president who accepts climate science and rejects voodoo economics, and whose domestic platform would not engineer the largest upward redistribution of resources in American history. Even if the relatively sober Jeb Bush wins the nomination, he will have to accommodate himself to his party's barking-mad consensus. She is non-crazy America’s choice by default. And it is not necessarily an exciting choice, but it is an easy one, and a proposition behind which she will probably command a majority.
