Who Made Hillary Queen?

Among so much about American politics that can impress or depress a friendly transatlantic observer, there's nothing more astonishing than this: Why on Earth should Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton be the front-runner for the presidency?

She has now pulled well ahead of Sen. Barack Obama, both in polls and in fundraising. If the Democrats can't win next year, they should give up for good, so she must be considered the clear favorite for the White House. But in all seriousness: What has she ever done to deserve this eminence? How could a country that prides itself on its spirit of equality and opportunity possibly be led by someone whose ascent owes more to her marriage than to her merits?

We all, nations as well as individuals, have difficulty seeing ourselves as others see us. In this case, I doubt that Americans realize how extraordinary their country appears from the outside. In Europe, the supposed home of class privilege and heritable status, we have abandoned the hereditary principle (apart from the rather useful institution of constitutional monarchy), and the days are gone when Pitt the Elder was prime minister and then Pitt the Younger. But Americans find nothing untoward in Bush the Elder being followed by Bush the Younger.

At a time when Americans seem to contemplate with equanimity up to 28 solid years of uninterrupted Bush-Clinton rule, please note that there are almost no political dynasties left in British politics, at least on the Tory side. Admittedly, Hilary Benn, the environmental secretary, is the fourth generation of his family to sit in Parliament and the third to serve in a Labor Party cabinet. But England otherwise has nothing now to match the noble houses of Kennedy, Gore and Bush.

And in no other advanced democracy today could someone with Clinton's r¿sum¿ even be considered a candidate for national leadership. It's true that wives do sometimes inherit political reins from their husbands, but usually in recovering dictatorships in Latin America such as Argentina, where Sen. Cristina Fern¿ndez de Kirchner may succeed President N¿stor Kirchner, or Third World countries such as Sri Lanka or the Philippines -- and in those cases often when the husbands have been assassinated. Such things also happened (apart from the assassination) in the early days of women's entry into British politics. The first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons was Lady Astor, by birth Nancy Langhorne of Danville, Va., who inherited her husband's seat in 1919 when he inherited his peerage, but we haven't seen a case like that for many years

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/05/AR2007100501680.html

It's further down on the front page of GD-P. :)

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