Just over a year ago, actress-liberal activist Ashley Judd opined that Hillary Clinton “might be the most overqualified candidate we've had since…Thomas Jefferson or George Washington.” Esquire’s Charles Pierce was a bit more restrained in a Sunday post, asserting that Hillary “might be the most qualified presidential candidate that we've seen since James Monroe,” who was first elected POTUS two hundred years ago this coming fall.
Pierce lamented that Hillary’s chops as a campaigner don’t measure up to her credentials for the highest office: “She's an outsider by birth and an insider by resume. It would take a formidable politician to be able to use both of those qualities to maximum advantage. (If she combined her background with her husband's natural political skillz, we'd likely wake up next November to find her Empress Of The Universe.) And she is not that pol. Not yet, anyway.”
From Pierce’s post (bolding added):
HRC has had a bullseye on her back ever since she got to Washington. Some of the attacks upon her from the radio monkeyhouse were distasteful and extreme, and they set the template for the unreasoning assaults upon the current president…
…An era in which the first woman president followed the first African-American president would be one of the most remarkable periods in American political history—and the most remarkable period in American electoral history…
But her primary strength, that in terms of a CV, she might be the most qualified presidential candidate that we've seen since James Monroe, by a curious kind of reverse English, keeps that enthusiasm spinning just out of her reach. She has been the wife of the governor of Arkansas, a gifted public interest lawyer and a successful corporate counsel, First Lady of the United States, a senator from a huge and important state, the Secretary of State, and now she's running for president, as the odds-on favorite, for the second time. She is unquestionably part of the establishment, but she's also undeniably a trailblazer in terms of women's rights. She's an outsider by birth and an insider by resume. It would take a formidable politician to be able to use both of those qualities to maximum advantage. (If she combined her background with her husband's natural political skillz, we'd likely wake up next November to find her Empress Of The Universe.) And she is not that pol. Not yet, anyway.
