The Un-Fab Four

I've stopped trying to follow Hillary Clinton's e-mail affair, as it would take a great deal of scrutiny to understand an increasingly complex and tangled issue.  But she is being investigated for how she used her account as Secretary of State, she may have erased her private server (or so she was asked if she did), and her attempts to clear up the matter have only deepened her problems.  She's not necessarily in any trouble legally, and she may never be, as much of this is political.  But her defensiveness and her arrogance over the email snafu have only made her look more secretive and less than forthcoming, which only serves to remind people about everything they don't like Hillary or her husband.  In other words, it's not what she did, it's how she's handling it. 

Despite rumors that Joe Biden or Al Gore may sense an opening created by Hillary's vulnerabilities and enter the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination campaign, it's really too late for either one of them to do so.  On the PBS NewsHour this past Monday, one political commentator - it was either Amy Walter or Tamara Keith, they're the female and Monday evening version of Mark Shields and David Brooks  - said that Hillary is still the likely 2016 Democratic nominee because the party has . . . nobody else.        

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the four nobodies challenging Hillary Clinton for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination!

They are, clockwise from top left, Bernie Sanders, Jim Webb, Martin O'Malley and Lincoln Chafee.

Since when did Hillary's opponents become non-existent?  They're all good, solid candidates.  Sanders, the junior senator from Vermont, has surged in the polls and has taken the progressive movement by storm, despite being a political independent.  Webb, a one-term senator from Virginia, has tried to focus his campaign on the working class and has staked a more moderate tone in his presidential bid.  My man Marty, of course, was a successful progressive two-term Maryland governor, and Rhode Island's Chafee, a former Republican, has been a senator and a governor who happened to be the only Republican senator to vote against going to war in Iraq in 2002.

All of these men would be better Presidents than the confederacy of dunces that make up the Republican 2016 presidential candidates, and all four of them are fine alternatives to Hillary.  But the media could care less.  The press has given Sanders only scant coverage and is only paying more attention to him now because it has no choice.  As for the other three - including O'Malley - they're just viewed as a sideshow, good for a chortle or two.  

Democrats had better start looking at the alternatives. They'd also better start demanding more primary and caucus debates, as O'Malley has been doing.  It's increasingly clear that Hillary is damaged goods.  Democrats need another choice.  And here are four of them.  

Let's have a real nomination fight!