Megan Carpentier columnUS politics This article is more than 9 years old

Why Hillary Clinton should keep her mouth shut

This article is more than 9 years oldMegan Carpentier

She might not be the change liberals are looking for, but her no-comment policy – on Ferguson and beyond – will keep her the frontrunner

Hillary Clinton is not going to save you.

She’s not your mother, your best friend or your confessor; a time machine to the 90s, the solution to the nation’s increasing divisiveness, or the correct variable in a complicated equation that equals 538; a reflection of what you want to hear, or the embodiment of what you want a “leader” to believe.

What she is: a politician with two successful Senate campaigns under her belt – both in Democrat-friendly New York – and one ultimately unsuccessful presidential campaign; the former US secretary of state; an author; the former First Lady of both the United States and the state of Arkansas; a lawyer; a soon-to-be grandmother; a flawed human being; and, despite the fact that she hasn’t even said if she plans to run for office ever again, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016 (if a vote were held today, which it won’t be).

So why the relentless push from reporters and pundits for Clinton to comment on the brutal killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent crackdown by police in Ferguson? Why does anyone expect a private citizen to say something public about the heartbreak of another family, about the need for healing at this time, about letting the law run its course?

Because, you know, President Obama did say almost all of that two weeks ago.

It would be easy enough to dismiss the Hillary-soundbite fever as part of the 24-hour cable-and-internet news cycle: we want recognizable people to say moderately controversial things so that they can be written about and aggregated, played and replayed, then analyzed, dissected, allowed to cool and finally reheated for the increasingly small Sunday talk show audience.

But pundits, reporters and Clinton supporters want her to comment on everything and anything – especially domestic issues – because they want a specific kind of comment: one they didn’t get from Obama.

In certain liberal quarters – not just the erstwhile Puma factions – there is a palpable disaffection with the Obama presidency and, from the Brown statement to his deportation policy to his drone program to the dearth of bankers languishing behind bars, there have been plenty of reasons for liberals to have lost that hopey-changey feel.

Into that expectation gap snuck the Ready For Hillary folks – who reportedly aren’t coordinating with Clinton herself – as they hope to lay groundwork for her comeback. The Hillary hopefuls want her to be, right now, the one thing she most definitely is not: the current president of the United States.

Though she is ostensibly hawking just a (sleep-inducing) memoir of her time in the foreign policy trenches this summer, and has limited her public comments to foreign policy issues, somehow, Clinton still almost seems like the change some Americans have been waiting for.

But as others have noted, there is still virtually no political upside for Clinton to issuing a public statement about much of anything going on in this country – much less about Ferguson, given how deeply divided by race the country remains and how much of that divided sentiment she’d have to win over in both a Democratic primary and a general election, if she did run and secure the nomination. There’s no political upside to Hillary Clinton doing anything right now except to remain as non-controversial as possible – which, even on book tour, she didn’t quite manage to achieve. After all, she’s still outpolling her Democrat rivals by more than 50 points, and nationwide support for her is nearly 10 points higher than for Obama – though down from her tenure as Secretary of State, during which time she notably wasn’t running for office.

When it comes to her political career, Clinton is a consummate politician – she is, in the parlance of the New York Times, “no angel”. So she isn’t going to resurrect disenfranchised Obama supporters’ passion for politics, and she’s not going to snap her fingers and undo Obama’s extrajudicial killing policy, and she’s not going to go back in time and support same sex marriage any faster or get single-payer pushed through. She’s not going to make grand pronouncements that mend race relations – goodness knows her supporters did their own damage to race relations in 2008 – and, even if she does destroy the glass ceiling in 2016, gender inequality will continue to exist.

She might be the first woman to be elected president one day – but 2016 is a long way off. Being the front-runner is great but, to stay there, Clinton knows as well as anyone that she’s better off to stay mum and let her supporters make assumptions than to open her mouth and prove her critics right.

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