What does she want?

She became a senator from New York as a final tribute from a Democratic electorate to her husband. The man who preceded her in office, the great Daniel Patrick Moynihan, wryly saluted her “Illinois-Arkansas enthusiasm,” Hillary and New York being as much a marriage of convenience as Hillary and Bill. She was a legislative nonentity in the Senate, because she was running for president from the day she was sworn in. (A few of the 2016 Republican contenders know a thing or two about that.) When her moment came, she was outdone in the Democratic primary by an even bigger legislative nonentity in the Senate. It was funny, in a cruel way, and people laughed at her, in a cruel way.

Barack Obama condescended to offer her the scrap of a Cabinet position, which she botched, doing great damage to his administration and the country in the process. She was one of the most inept chief diplomats in memory. Bill Clinton had found a place on the global stage through his close relationship with Tony Blair while Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright minded the shop. George H. W. Bush before him had in a moment of Middle Eastern crisis shown himself to be a true master of the game. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department had the nation, including its Democrats, longing for the steady-handed confidence of the Carter years. She was bad enough that John Kerry was considered an improvement.

When her moment came again, she was put through the wringer by a dopey socialist from Vermont whose young, idealistic partisans — the people people like Mrs. Clinton like to think of themselves as — still don’t want her. They’ll take her over Donald Trump, of course, and they’ll feel a little like the man who hears: “You’re responding reasonably well to the chemo.”

RTWT. It’s cruel, but fair.

[Update a while later]

Link is fixed, sorry.