No, Hillary Clinton is not running for president again

The Wall Street Journal op-ed is an unserious piece by unserious people and it deserves to be taken as such

(AFP via Getty Images)

On Tuesday night, The Wall Street Journal released an op-ed by Doug Schoen and Andrew Stein arguing that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s unpopularly created an opening for Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2024.

The two made the case that Ms Clinton, the former Secretary of State and New York senator, has an advantage to be a presumptive nominee.

“She is an experienced national figure who is younger than Mr Biden and can offer a different approach from the disorganised and unpopular one the party is currently taking,” they write. “If Democrats lose control of Congress in 2022, Mrs. Clinton can use the party’s loss as a basis to run for president again, enabling her to claim the title of ‘change candidate.’”

Set aside the fact that Mrs Clinton being an experienced figure and a “change candidate” are two contradictory ideas that cannot be reconciled, there are many reasons to not take this argument seriously.

Case in point, the fact Mr Schoen and Mr Stein chose to place the op-ed in The Wall Street Journal’s notoriously right-wing opinion page – despite the fact its reporting is solid – indicates this was an attention grab not meant to be seriously considered by Democrats.

Second, it is important to consider who wrote this piece, starting with the fact that neither of them supported Ms Clinton. Set aside the fact that Mr Stein, who is ostensibly a Democrat and a former Manhattan Borough president, pleaded guilty for tax evasion, supported Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election and announced his endorsement in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

Mr Stein also tried to maintain his relevance when he wrote an op-ed again in The Wall Street Journal arguing that Mr Trump should dump Vice President Mike Pence in exchange for his former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, saying it could help with women and suburbanites. Mr Trump, of course, never took Mr Stein up on this proposition but it did give Mr Stein some temporary relevance, which he clearly seems to crave.

That leaves Mr Schoen, a regular contributor to right-wing channel Newsmax, who said he would not support Ms Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election after then-FBI Director James Comey sent a letter saying it had discovered new emails. His most recent distinction was working for Mike Bloomberg’s farcical 2020 presidential run.

Mr Biden and Ms Harris do indeed have trouble on the horizon with their sinking poll numbers. Democrats also do risk losing their House and Senate majorities, already razor-thin. But the idea of replacing them with Ms Clinton says more about them than the state of the Democratic Party.