Forget all the hype, Hillary has won the Democratic nomination already.
The big political news over the weekend had to be Hillary Clinton releasing a video announcing what political observes have noted since election night 2004: she is running for president.
The thing to remember about these sorts of announcements is that while they can be a lot of fun, they rarely impact the outcome in any meaningful way. And the reason is pretty simple, Hillary Clinton has been in the center of the national spotlight for over 25 years now and so most people made up their mind about her long ago. A silly looking logo just isn’t going to change that. In fact it’s safe to say that everything about this announcement will be long forgotten by the time we get to Election Day in 2016.
Furthermore with Hillary Clinton it’s even less likely as she basically has already wrapped up the nomination. As political scientist Dave Hopkins put it recently:
I share the conventional view that Hillary is unstoppable absent an unexpected sharp turn in the race that would almost certainly have to be a major scandal of some type (the email thing isn’t big enough to do it)…
I think that’s exactly right. She has already racked up a huge number of important endorsements from Democratic party actors and many of her declared opponents like Jim Webb are just too far out of the Democratic policy mainstream to ever win the nomination in the modern era.
It’s important to remember that in politics anything can happen, but at this point Hillary not winning her party’s endorsement would have to depend on her being indicted for a serious crime or some sort of RFK style tragedy happening. Baring that she’ll be on the ballot in November of 2016.
Simply put the party decides the nomination, and for a number of reasons the Democrats have decided on Hillary Clinton. The GOP though is another matter entriley.
Like The Good Men Project On Facebook
Photo by Bebeto Mathews/AP