Unlikeable

[John F.] Kennedy was, whether for good or bad, an enormously large figure. Historically, he was a gatekeeper. He unlatched the gate and through the door marched Catholics, blacks, and Jews, and ethnics, women, youth, academics, newspersons, and an entirely new breed of politician who did not think of themselves as politicians—all demanding their share of the action and the power in what is now called participatory democracy.

—Theodore H. White, The Making of the President, 1960

Forty-eight years after JFK’s assassination, which many historians mark as the moment America lurched to the left, a new cultural revolution is convulsing our country.

Today, America is witnessing upheavals in communications, technology, globalization, demographics, popular entertainment, financial markets, industry, and commerce. And all of this is having a profound impact on how we order our lives—what we consider morally right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, normal and abnormal.

A “new normal” is sweeping across America, turning long-accepted standards and codes of behavior upside down.

• Support for same-sex marriage has doubled over the past decade to 60 percent.

• A majority of Americans support the legalization of marijuana.

• In many communities, the police, not the criminals, are considered the problem.

• The percentage of adults who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly 8 percentage points in the past seven years.

• Nearly a quarter of all Americans describe themselves as atheists, agnostic, or “nothing in particular.”

• In less than thirty years non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of Americans.

• More than half the births to women under thirty occur outside marriage.

“Has American culture become gross, coarse, vulgar?” writes author Stan Latreille, expressing the feelings of perhaps a majority of Americans, or at least a majority of those over the age of forty. “If I say yes, I no doubt will be dismissed as an old fogey. Well, I do say yes, so there. And if you disagree, I say you are blind, deaf, zoned out or just plain stupid.”

Examples of the coarsening of America abound.

• Kim Kardashian is celebrated for balancing a champagne glass on her rear end.

• Bruce Jenner, once the picture of masculinity, is canonized for being castrated.

• Summer’s Eve feminine-care company runs a video on its website and YouTube showing a talking vagina.

And Americans themselves seem coarser, grosser than previous generations.

• The average American woman now weighs the same as the average American man did in the 1960s.

• Tattoos—once limited to sailors and members of biker gangs—now disfigure more than a third of all Americans under the age of thirty.

• Nearly a third of those under thirty have a body piercing someplace other than the lobe of their ears.

• Within living memory, men wore ties to baseball games; today many people dress, even at work, as if in imitation of Shaggy from Scooby-Doo.

• According to a study from professors at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and the Thunderbird School of Global Management, employees are now twice as likely to experience rude behavior at an office as they were in 1998.

Conservatives have every reason to be alarmed by the decline in American appearance and behavior, manners and morals. Along with the Roman orator Cicero, we say, “O tempora, o mores,” which translates to “Alas the times, and the manners.”

“I am glad that I’m not raising kids today,” Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia told New York magazine. “One of the things that upsets me about modern society is the coarseness of manners. You can’t go to a movie—or watch a television show for that matter—without hearing the constant use of the F-word—including, you know, ladies using it.”

Fifteen years ago, Jacques Barzun, the brilliant conservative cultural critic and historian, wrote a book titled From Dawn to Decadence in which he lamented the direction in which our culture was headed.

The cruel, perverse and obscene [is] more and more taken for granted as natural and normal. . . . The attack on authority, the ridicule on anything established, the distortions of language and objects, the indifference to clear meaning, the violence to the human form, the return to the primitive elements of sensation, the growing lists of genres called “Antis” . . . have made Modernism at once the mirror of disintegration and an incitement to extending it.

Things have gone downhill since then. Conservatives rightly fear that decadence will lead to the fall of the United States just as surely as it led to the fall of Rome.

Meanwhile, the chasm between conservatives and liberals grows wider by the day. We live in a house divided. This profound difference between people on the Right and Left will have to be managed with diligence if our country is not to fragment and fall apart. Great leadership will be required. This, not income inequality, is the moral issue of our time.

Thus, it is altogether fitting and proper to ask: Is Hillary Clinton the woman for these times?

Can she, as George H. W. Bush once promised to do, make this a “kinder, gentler nation”?

Can she, as George W. Bush described himself as governor of Texas, be “a uniter, not a divider”?

Can she reverse America’s decline?

Is she fit to lead?

Barack Obama for one certainly doesn’t think so.

He believes that voters will be looking for a “fresh start” when they go to the polls in 2016.

“I think the American people, you know, they’re going to want—you know, that new car smell,” he told This Week’s George Stephanopoulos.

It didn’t take a high-paid political consultant to parse the president’s meaning. To him, Hillary Clinton represents that old car smell.

Many of the people I interviewed for this book found themselves agreeing with Obama on the subject of Hillary’s staleness.

It would be easy to dismiss this point of view if only conservatives expressed it. But liberals I spoke with seemed almost as nervous as conservatives about the prospect of placing the honorific “Madame President” in front of Hillary’s name. Even among those who said they planned to vote for her, many acknowledged that she was a badly flawed candidate whose lack of accomplishments, serial scandals, absence of shame, unlikeability, and clumsiness as a campaigner could doom her designs on the presidency.

“Nobody wants to go to a fund-raiser and get another picture with her,” a jaded Hollywood supporter of Hillary told the New York Times’ Maureen Dowd. “But we have to figure out how to get her [to the White House].”

“The joke circulates in Hollywood,” Dowd continued, “that Hillary is like Coca-Cola’s Dasani water: She’s got a great distribution system, but nobody likes the taste.”

“It’s a long record going back over decades of questionable ethical practices,” said former Rhode Island governor and U.S. senator Lincoln Chafee, the longest of long shots in the Democratic primary scrum. “People groan when I bring up Whitewater and all these things, the Rose Law Firm records; it seems like it never stops. Now, we are into the tenure of secretary of state and the emails and of course the Clinton Foundation donations at the same time the State Department is making critical decisions, combined with some of those donations by the Clinton Foundation. It’s just too close and too many ethical questions.”

Hard numbers backed up Chafee’s concern about Hillary’s integrity. As soon as she announced her campaign for president, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll reported that her “unfavorables” jumped six points. She fared even worse among younger Democratic voters. Her “favorability” with that cohort had dropped by 15 percent since 2007.

Virtually all of the Democrats I talked to said that Hillary would benefit from some healthy competition in the primaries. They yearned for Elizabeth Warren, either because she, unlike Hillary, was, in their estimation, “the real thing,” or because she would make the Democratic primaries a true contest. These Democrats were despondent when Warren withdrew from the race, leaving Bernie Sanders, the former socialist mayor of the People’s Republic of Burlington and current U.S. senator from Vermont; Martin O’Malley, the tax-and-spend former governor of Maryland; and the aforementioned former liberal Republican Lincoln Chafee as the last men standing. None of them appeared to be up to the challenge of toppling Hillary.

It wasn’t only rank-and-file Democrats who harbored uneasy feelings about Hillary. As readers will remember, influential figures in the Democratic Party—elected officials, party bosses, and big donors—were also voicing reservations about Hillary, although they did so sotto voce so Hillary wouldn’t hear. This anti-Hillary sentiment was especially alive and well in the White House, where the ruling triumvirs—Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Michelle Obama—were working overtime to undermine Hillary’s chances.

The Obamas had a powerful ally in Elizabeth Warren, who seemed bent on making mischief for Hillary and the Clinton legacy.

“Warren has suggested that President Bill Clinton’s administration served the same ‘trickle down’ economics as its Republican predecessors,” wrote David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and now a senior editor at the Atlantic.

“Warren has denounced the Clinton administration’s senior economic appointees as servitors of the big banks.

“Warren has blasted Bill Clinton’s 1996 claim that the era of big government is over and his repeal of Glass-Steagall and other financial regulations.

“Warren has characterized Hillary Clinton herself as a conscienceless politician who betrayed her professed principles for campaign donations.”

Warren’s strategy was clear: she wanted to force Hillary to renounce her “centrist” past and move further and further to the left.

And the strategy was working.

“[Hillary] is so terrified of losing Iowa, and she is so terrified that even if she wins the Iowa caucuses that some liberal does well enough to wound her that it will hurt her chances, that’s forgetting the fact that there’s a general election to come if she’s the nominee,” said Bloomberg Politics editor Mark Halperin. “She’s terrified of the left and it’s showing on a range of issues. Wall Street won’t hold her accountable to it but she, I think, is creating a lot of trouble for herself and it’s only just begun.”

Hillary was beginning to sound like Warren’s ventriloquist dummy.

Did Warren declare, “The game is rigged”?

Hillary said, “The deck is stacked” in favor of the rich.

Did Warren say drastic measures had to be taken to tackle income inequality?

Hillary said that saving the American economy from disaster would require “toppling” the 1 percent.

Did Warren favor paid family medical leave?

So did Hillary.

Did Warren call for a constitutional amendment to outlaw “big money” in politics?

So did Hillary.

Did Warren want to double the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour?

Mega-dittos from Hillary.

“On the party’s favorite issue of income inequality, Clinton is the poster child for what Democrats believe is wrong with the United States,” wrote Ed Rogers, a contributor to the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog. “If she is the Democratic nominee in 2016, how will the party standard bearer rationalize her gargantuan haul of cash over the past few years? How can she reconcile her past with her platform?

“There are a lot of questions that Clinton will have to answer. . . .

“Even the famous Clinton gall and lack of shame will make explaining some of this with a straight face impossible.”

In the course of researching this book, I spoke with many people who were ardent Hillary defenders. As far as I could tell, their arguments in her favor boiled down to three main points.

• As one supporter put it, Hillary’s “magnitude of experience . . . dwarfs any of her potential opponents in 2016.”

• The time is long overdue for a woman to be president.

• Buy one (Hillary) and get one free (Bill).

Each of these arguments was seriously flawed.

• Hillary’s sum total of “experience” can be tweeted in 140 characters or less: HillaryCare, Monica cover-up, Iraq war vote, bungled 2008 campaign, Russian reset, Benghazi, deleted e-mails, selling favors at State.

• “Becoming the first female president is a worthy goal,” writes a Washington Post columnist. Perhaps. But becoming a great president is a far worthier goal. The essential point is this: Americans should not hire a president on the basis of affirmative action.

• Buy Hillary and get a free Willy? We tried that once before. It ended with a president whose license to practice law was suspended by the Arkansas Bar, and who was impeached by the House of Representatives—only the second president in history to suffer that ignominy. Do we really want the Clinton circus back to town?

And so, the fundamental question Americans will face when they go to the polls to pick their next president is this: Have our standards and morals declined to the point that we will elect someone who is so shameless that she lies without a tinge of guilt, and so untrustworthy that she engages in massive cover-ups?

How we answer that question on November 8, 2016, will determine our nation’s future.

What difference does it make?

Plenty.