For the Love of Money and Hillary

Chris Matthews, who has all but begged Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to consider a presidential run in 2016, says that a Hillary candidacy would not only draw all the big money to the campaign in the Democratic primaries, it would draw any big money at all.  This re-enforces my earlier blog entry about how the Republicans are the party of rising stars and how the Democrats are the party of shooting stars.  Maybe it would be beneficial for the Clintons to return to the White House, but I'm suspicious.  Two thousand sixteen will be nothing like the nineties, a period in which cheap oil and relative global stability allowed Bill Clinton to run the country and the economy on automatic pilot, even if the economy does improve in a second Obama administration.  And if improves under a Romney administration, how formidable would Hillary be as a challenger to a Republican incumbent rather than as a Democratic heir apparent?  And by the way, for the last time a former Democratic President was successful in getting another Democrat into the White House, you'd have to go back to 1844, when Andrew Jackson used his power within the party to get his fellow Tennesseean James Knox Polk nominated and then elected over the Republican presidential candidate, who was . . . Wait! The Republican Party didn't even exist then!  That's how long ago it was! (For the record, Polk's opponent was Whig Henry Clay.)  

It's this money thing that frightens me.  Hillary is pretty much the only Democrat who can raise enough dough for 2016 in this new campaign financing world created by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision (which, ironically, resulted from a suit involving an anti-Hillary "documercial" movie).  Maybe Joe Biden would be an exception.  That means the future of the Democratic Party lies in the hands of old fogies rather than in new blood - the blood of younger, up-and-coming politicians, whose rise (like Barack Obama's) is so essential to the growth of the Democratic Party or of any party.  The Republicans can stay in power despite their cultural irrelevance by raising more money than the Democrats and promoting more new faces like Paul Ryan and Chris Christie, and thus dominate the American political scene.  You know how rock and roll - and the recording industry as a whole - declined? Too much of a reliance on aging veterans to bring in the big bucks.  That's the Democratic Party's problem.  As previously noted, Hillary Clinton will be 69 in 2016 and Joe Biden will be 74 then, but either of them will be able to raise money more easily than younger players who won't be able to advance their own careers.  

When they go, the party goes.