It had to come sometime, and it came in one very bad week for the Democrats: that the many big problems with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama finally grew too great for the press to ignore.
Obama in his own different way is heading towardsNixon-like levels of weirdness, as, beaten down by the failures regarding his ventures, he appears to have quit his own job.
A.B. Stoddard of the Hill says in effect he has stopped being president and chooses to live in a world of his own, shutting out the problems that have become overwhelming, giving dinners where he talks about NBA ratings and where he will live when he leaves. And having stopped being president, he has also stopped being presidential -- Politico reported last week of a rally, "So punchy was he that he was leaning arms hanging off the front of his podium, telling a few hecklers to 'sit down' and instructing the Secret Service not to bother removing them, Obama said he was feeling liberated. ... 'I don't have to run for office anymore, so I can just let it rip,' he said."
Calling himself "the bear," he has taken to roaming the streets around Washington, dropping in at fast food stops and bothering customers. But he jumped the shark on a trip out West last week, when he skirted the crisis convulsing the border to hang out and chill with the folks. "What exactly is going on with the leader of the free world?" asked the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin, having watched him in Denver eat pizza with strangers, shoot pool with the governor, and shake hands with "a guy on the street" who was wearing a horse's head mask.
Andrea Mitchell attacked him for horsing around while ignoring a crisis, asking Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar what he imagined Obama was thinking, and why. Cueller replied that the pictures had "floored" him: "He’s saying he’s too busy to go down to the border, but you have time to drink beer and play pool."
As Eilperin notes, he’s "trying to free himself from the constraints of office ... but to some, breaking free can also look like running away." It can look to some others like "having a breakdown." Obama will not be the fourth president (if you count Nixon) to be impeached, but he may become the first to be led away by the hand to a nice, quiet place where he can get treatment. And that would make history, too.
As for Hillary Clinton, she took a long step toward becoming toxic when tapes emerged of a years-old conversation in which she boasted of getting a man who raped a 12-year -old child off with a slap on the wrist. In doing so, she painted the girl as unstable, and given to making things up. Ruth Marcus says, she was "doing her job," but did she have to so much like doing it? Karen Tumulty called her tone "swaggering." Susan Page and Andrea Mitchell agreed.
Don't count on people buying Marcus' line when they hear ads in 2016 of Hillary's voice, being rather too happy; the victim, saying the trial destroyed her; and the mother of the Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi, saying Hillary lied to her over her son's dead body about how and why he was killed.
So much for concern about "girls and women," and their fine feelings. The only girl and woman Hillary Clinton was ever concerned for was Hillary Clinton. We now have her word about that.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
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