Hillary and The Left’s Impenetrable Bubble

By Heather Wilhelm Published on November 5, 2015

On Tuesday, Kentucky voters stunned the chattering classes by electing conservative Republican businessman Matt Bevin to be their next governor. While most polls had Democrat Jack Conway pegged to win the race, reality begged to differ: Bevin earned 53 percent of the vote, leaving his opponent with a mere 44 percent. These days, a GOP governor in Kentucky is a relative rarity; Bevin will be the second Republican to take office in 40 years.

Appearing on MSNBC, Tom Brokaw wondered aloud if Bevin’s victory could spell “terror” for the Democrats on a national level. He cited political analyst Charles Cook, who noted that a Bevin win could be “radioactive for the Democrats because it’s a rejection, again, of Obama and what the Democrats are standing for at this point.”

Kentucky’s Democratic House Speaker Greg Stumbo had a different take. In a televised speech that Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway correctly labeled an “epic meltdown,” Stumbo tried to reconcile himself to the supposed madness of the Bevin win. Among other things, he helpfully reminded everyone that Jesus’s mother, Mary, “did not ride an elephant into Bethlehem” — how did I miss that point in Biblical Political Theocratic Science Class? — and finished his speech with a humdinger.

“I believe that there’s a horse out there,” Stumbo declared, because the man clearly loves animal analogies — and, of course, it’s Derby country.

“It’s not American Pharoah,” he added. “It’s an Arkansas Traveler. And that horse is bringing a lady jockey, and that horse and that jockey are going to come to Kentucky next year and help us rebuild this party. Thank you, and God bless every one of you.”

Yikes. When you start talking about savior politicians storming in on horses, you’re never in good shape. Also, I’m sorry, but every time I read the phrase “lady jockey,” I snort coffee out of my nose. It reminds me of that weird high school/college sports tradition where the male teams are called, say, the “Panthers,” and the women’s teams are called the “Lady Panthers,” which leads one to imagine a weird, sexy, lipstick-wearing panther when a regular old androgynous sports-playing panther would do.

Stumbo’s description, as weird as it may be, is perhaps apt: Hillary Clinton, after all, is our proverbial national Lady Panther. Her female designation — and her continued hyping of it — is really all she has. Trust me: She will never, not ever, let us forget that she is a Lady Panther, just as she will never let us forget that Bernie Sanders is clearly a sexist, oppressive, sinister tool of The Patriarchy, Wild-Eyed Nutty Professor Division™.

More importantly, Stumbo’s speech also shares qualities with the movie Jurassic World. If you haven’t seen it, Jurassic World is basically the same movie as Jurassic Park, but with hotter lead actors, some hokey man-dinosaur telepathy, and a bigger, scarier hybrid dinosaur villain.

In the film, the hubris-filled, money-hungry creators of the “new and improved” Jurassic World theme park have created high-tech, gliding transportation bubbles that usher gimlet-eyed guests through a dinosaur-packed jungle. These bubbles are, we are told, impenetrable; when the right nightmarish and industrious dinosaur comes along, of course, said bubbles are promptly smashed to smithereens.

Today, similar bubbles clamp around the heads of many in the hard-core American left. Matt Bevin, in this view, is a horrifying conservative troglodyte, to be sure, and a foil to an “enlightened” left, but just a fluke: Just wait a few short months, when Kentucky’s backwards Republican leadership transforms the state into a scene from Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic The Road — you know, like Texas, a state to which everyone is inexplicably moving — and THEN America will see!

Ms. Lady Panther herself, Hillary Clinton, is not immune to the far-left invisible bubble helmet craze. Her husband may have been long hailed for his canny triangulation through the wilds of American politics, but Hillary, at least for now, is casting her bets with the same leftist politics that rocketed fringe candidate Bevin to victory.

It is thus, in a country with record sales of guns for six months in a row, and with the NRA’s approval at a record 58 percent, that Hillary Clinton has made gun control a centerpiece of her campaign. It is thus, after Houston voters resoundingly rejected a measure that would allow men with a “female gender identity” to use women’s public restrooms, and vice versa — the diverse city, which has also cheerfully elected a lesbian mayor for three terms, voted it down by around 62 percent — that Hillary Clinton vows to continue to push for similar laws.

“This,” she told her 4.62 million Twitter followers, referring to transgender identity activism, “is a reminder of the work still left to do.”

Not at the top of the priority list of most Americans, I’d hazard a guess. Is it any wonder that while national Democrats lurch left, the GOP cleans up at the local level? After Tuesday’s votes, Republicans have “total control of 24 states,” holding both legislative and gubernatorial leadership, as Reid Wilson reported in the Washington Post. Out of 50 states, 33 now have Republican governors; out of 99 state legislatures, 67 now belong to the GOP.

Republicans could screw things up: They have a particular talent for doing just that. But for all the doom and gloom on the GOP side of the political aisle, it’s occasionally helpful to look at the hard-core left. It’s a gleaming sea of heads encased in bubble helmets, each celebrating top-down, tone-deaf, force-fed conformity, oblivious to the tremors beneath their feet.

 

Heather Wilhelm is a writer based in Austin,Texas. Her work can be found at  http://www.heatherwilhelm.com/ and her Twitter handle is @heatherwilhelm.

This article originally appeared at RealClearPolitics on November 5, 2015, and is reprinted with their permission.

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