Hillary Clinton's bogus journey

Hillary Clinton wants to take you back in time. This is not some excellent adventure. It's a bogus journey back to a past America has long since moved beyond.

The Clintons have been preparing for a return to the White House since before they left. That's why, in 2000, Clinton opted not to seek a Senate seat from Arkansas, where her husband served for more than a decade as governor and attorney general before running for president, but in New York, where Democratic dominance easily prevailed over carpet-bagging concerns.

That set Clinton up for a coronation in 2008. But a funny thing happened on the way to the throne: Clinton turned out to be a bad candidate. She could not enumerate a reason for her candidacy, or offer an agenda that gave her any distinction, other than a return to the halcyon days of the Clinton administration. Still, thanks to her organization and the still-powerful charisma of her husband, Clinton challenged for the nomination all the way down to the wire.

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Eight years later, Hillary Clinton is back. And that time-tripping pattern — last cycle's loser trotted out as this cycle's winner — is something Republicans know all too well.

The GOP has long had a bad habit of picking the "next in line" for the nomination. That started in 1980, as Republicans rallied around Ronald Reagan four years after he nearly unseated incumbent Gerald Ford for the nomination. Eight years later, the party turned to the 1980 runner-up George H. W. Bush, who managed to win one election but lost the next to Bill Clinton. In 1996, the party nominated Bob Dole, a World War II hero and the runner-up to the elder Bush in 1988.

After Dole lost, the GOP broke its pattern and nominated George W. Bush in 2000. However, in 2008 it went back to the 2000 runner-up in John McCain, who ended up being the sacrificial lamb to Obama. Even after that, the Republican Party ended up nominating the previous runner-up, Mitt Romney, to challenge Obama in his re-election bid. That turned out as well as most candidates in this "next-in-line" pattern have since 1988, which is to say, badly.

The re-emergence of Hillary Clinton as the front-runner — and perhaps the only credible Democratic candidate in the race — demonstrates the exhaustion of the party after the Obama era. Democrats have gotten blown out in statewide elections ever since 2010, a reaction at least in part to the progressive overreach of Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid in 2009 and 2010, and a refusal to triangulate afterward. Democrats have few credible candidates on their bench, and even the few they do have find themselves swamped by Clinton's connections to donors and activists. Sound familiar?

The back-to-the-past problem Republicans encountered in past campaigns will face Democrats this time around, too. In fact, these issues were best articulated 23 years ago by James Carville, who noted that the elder Bush belonged to the past while voters want to look ahead to the future. "The idea is, he reeks of yesterday," Carville said of Bush in a moment captured in the documentary War Room. "He has the stench of yesterday. He is so yesterday, if I think of yesterday, if I think of an old calendar, I think of George Bush's face on it."

After almost a quarter-century of Clintons on the national scene, Carville's remarks succinctly sum up Hillary Clinton's problem. In 1992, the Clinton campaign song was "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." In 2016, it might as well be "Yesterday."