Thursday Hillary Bash - Vacuity?

In stark contrast to Elizabeth Warren's juvenile 99 percenter manifesto (so well refuted by none other than Sarah Palin), Hillary Clinton remains vacuous and void of any meaningful policy platform.  At least, that's how she's starting to be viewed on the left.  When you lose the left in the modern Democratic party, you are dead in the water.

No less than liberal media pundit Andrew Sullivan takes up the case against Hillary:

The Clintons are still self-pitying money-grubbers – $12 million in speaking fees since she left the State Department? – and now their offspring, exploiting her nepotistic advantage with all the scrupulous ethics of her parents, is continuing the grift. If you ask of Clinton what she’s fighting for, what she believes in, if you want to get her to disagree with you on something, good luck. Any actual politics right now would tarnish the inevitability of a resume-led coronation. That the resume has little of any substance in her four years as secretary of state does not concern her. She was making “hard choices”, and if we cannot appreciate that, tant pis.

I’d like to find a reason to believe she’s a political force who stands for something in an era when there is a real appetite for serious change. She could, after all, decide to campaign vociferously in favor of the ACA this summer and fall (universal healthcare is, after all, one of her positions), but that might siphon money away from her foundation and candidacy. She could get out there and start framing a foreign policy vision. But, again, too risky. I see nothing that suggests a real passion for getting on with the fight – just the usual presumptions of a super-elite, super-rich and super-cocooned politician of the gilded age.

And he was far from done at that point. Positively catty.

Granted Clinton has posited a number of liberal positions, but in true Clinton fashion, those positions are as flexible as all Clintonian triangulation positions are.  Those of us on the right should fear her potential election.  But with a growing notion of draft Warren, and Warren herself staking out far, far left positions, what should we worry about more - a Clinton win or a Warren win?

Clinton will end up looking moderate by comparison.  She loses the liberal base to Warren as a result but looks more appealing to self-proclaimed centrists as a result.  Which scenario is worse?

And given a position of far left, or a position of no positions, which is less damaging to a Democratic presidential nominee?  Given 8 wearying years of Obama, the right will be more weary of the left, and the left will be more weary of the center where they believe Obama has landed.

There are no obvious answers here, but either nominee would make a terrible president, and any Republican nominee should look glorious to both conservatives and libertarians by comparison.  Then again that's not always how those on the right judge their candidates these days.