If one of Obama's great achievements was simply to be a black man elected to the Presidency, then her achievement to be elected as a women will be similar.  It forces all sorts of changed social attitudes simply by virtue of them having been elected.

The other great fallacy is to simply assume that her Presidency will simply be a continuation of Bill's and Barack's Presidencies.  Both those Presidencies were considerably shaped by the political realities of their period in office. Far more important than any imputed ideological orientations in determining the course of her Presidency will be the degree to which Democrats, and Progressives within the Dem party, can take control of Congress and State houses to tackle such issues as gerrymandering, voter suppression, campaign finance, the make-up of SCOTUS, Wall Street regulation and infrastructural investment in sustainable energy, energy conservation, education, student loans, healthcare and prison reform etc.

I find the media - and many "progressives" focus on imputed or ascribed personalities, media performance, character, and personal presentation to the exclusion of all serious policy discussion or the structural factors and processes which can block or facilitate change utterly infantile, naive, lazy and dishonest.

And that is why we have Trump.

Index of Frank's Diaries

"What's really fascinating is that there have been a number of recent studies looking at brain structural differences between liberals and conservatives," said Saltz. "And what's been found in several studies is that liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate gyrus. That is an area that is responsible for taking in new information and that impact of the new information on decision making or choices. Conservatives tended on the whole to have a larger right amygdala. Amygdala being a deeper brain structure that processes more emotional information--specifically fear-based information" [...]

"Basically the study showed that if you just based it on brain structural size difference, you could predict who would be a conservative and who would be a liberal with a frequency of 71.6 percent; 71.6 percent is a pretty high ability to predict who is a conservative and who is a liberal just from brain structure," Saltz said.

Here's audio of a 21-year-old Hillary Rodham sounding a lot like a Sanders supporter. The Wellesley graduate was selected by her classmates to give the college's first-ever student speech at the graduation ceremony in the spring of 1969. Rodham delivered a speech full of resolute optimism, recordings of which were released by Wellesley for the first time today.

"For too long our leaders have viewed politics as the art of the possible," she said. "And the challenge now is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible possible."

Last night, Associated Press - on a day when nobody voted - surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization's survey of "superdelegates": the Democratic Party's 720 insiders, corporate donors and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected delegates. AP claims that superdelegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive superdelegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP's declaration - on the ground that the superdelegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him - most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

Whether this was orchestrated with or without Clinton's knowledge, it is a nice example of the underhanded tactics of the Clinton campaign.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

It was Matt Taibbi who first identified the real problem with Barack Obama, that he is a largely self-satisfied exponent of the status quo. Jerome's recent (and necessary) evisceration of his foreign policy statements only underlines the fact that, should Obama become US President, nothing much will change. Not on the foreign policy front, and, especially, not on the domestic front.

I feel we're in the same territory with Hillary. Politicians rarely make concrete promises during campaigns, "Hope" and "Change" are more their tenor. "I'm not Trump" will probably do for Hillary.

But what we missed with our cynicism over Obama was .... everything. Everything that mattered anyway. You can complain about this or that, and god knows I've had a few moans myself about this and that, but the fact is, Obama has done a large amount. And condiering the opposition he's faced while doing it, it is beyond amazing he achieved anything.

Hillary will not be Obama, she will not be Bill. She has given no hostages to fortune, made no promises I can think of. But she has spent 25 years at the forefront of power. She's learned hard bitter lessons. Nobody denies she's an intensely bright, capable person, with character forged in the white heat of public vitriol few can even imagine, let alone experience. And she has come through whole.

Do. Not. Under-Estimate. This. Woman.

keep to the Fen Causeway

But I fear the practical effects might turn out little better for other women than, say, Clarence Thomas's appointment to the Supreme Court was for other blacks. Thomas obviously cared less about the fates of other blacks. Like too many US black conservatives I have known, their idea of civil rights advances was that they got the opportunity to get theirs. That would be ok with me if they also served others from their group. But, with Thomas, it didn't happen.  

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

1. One small but significant part of Obama's rise, was the underlying feeling that "Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton" just didn't feel good in a democracy. That her rise to prominence comes connected to Bill (and all those years) plus the 2 terms of waiting out the Obama presidency just makes the public jaded about her - and as you note, dealing with the constant attacks and pressure seems to have made her secretive and non-commital.

2. Obamacare means we all forget Hillarycare. She had a progressive vision for improving life for ordinary people - it was fixing healthcare. She put a huge amount into it and failed. But it did lay the ground for future change. Alas, it seems she internalised the failure and never wants to be so exposed by proposing controversial things.