Hillary '12: Democrats' only hope

By Reese Palley

The thing I remember best from my mother's home in Atlantic City, where I grew up, was an elegantly framed painting titled Hope. Wherever we moved, the painting went with us and was prominently displayed in our dining room. A reproduction of a work by the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts, it featured a blind girl in a desolate setting, plucking a lyre with all but one of its strings broken.

The image came rushing back to me in the heady days leading up to the improbable election of Barack Obama, who offered mostly hope to many of us who had almost abandoned it.

When my mother died, her household goods, including the painting, were sent by rail to my younger brother in California. In a foretaste of the Obama administration, the train carrying the goods fell off a bridge in the Midwest. Hope sank like a stone along with it.

Hope has been described as the weakest passion, and so it has been with Obama. It was barely strong enough to lift him to the presidency, but too weak, I am beginning to fear, to keep him there. It looks as if Republican hopes that Obama will be a one-term president are going to be fulfilled. And those of us for whom hope failed must now look about for something and someone else.

Considering the present mood of the country, Democrats will have a tough hill to climb. But we can still hope that two years is a lifetime in politics, and that the majority that was cobbled together for the midterm shift to the right will melt away by then.

But we can't depend on hope alone this time. In seeking a replacement for the terminally decent Obama, we must look for a candidate with more political savvy. And speaking of the tough hill that Democrats face climbing, who better than Hillary?

As far as realistic politics are concerned, she either learned them from or taught them to a master, her husband. She would have no problem in terms of name recognition. And her own health-care debacle taught her not to push politically sluggardly Americans too far. Her campaign would be able to portray her as a policy expert capable of recasting Obamacare, robbing the Republicans of a potent issue.

So let me be among the first to rally my fellow dystrophic Democrats around a winner from whom the presidency was snatched by an accidental, blind passion. Hillary for president: It sounds pretty good.