The left, especially the unruly mob of feminists, seems likely to rally around Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton for the Democrat nomination for president in 2016.  She has certainly earned that right.  Her first major life success was being married to the Democrat nominee for Congress in 1994, and her husband also defeated Congressman Hammerschmidt.  Then she was the loyal wife of the attorney general of Arkansas.  After that, she was the faithful wife of the governor of Arkansas for four terms, and Mrs. Clinton stood by her husband when he lost his bid for re-election as governor in strongly Democrat Arkansas in the 1982 election.

As the wife of President William Jefferson Clinton, she served a sacrificial wifely role as cannon fodder for an ill-fated comprehensive health care reform bill.  Then, in the best tradition of country music, Frau Clinton performed the duty to "Stand by Your Man" even when those who believed in protecting women from creepy male bosses and other forms of male intimidation of women must have been rolling their eyes in disgust.

This is all in the grand tradition of leftist champions of the myriad elements of their cobbled coalition.  Young black women are encouraged to cripple themselves and hobble the lives of their children by out of wedlock child-rearing.  Hispanics seeking to become American citizens are urged not to learn English so that they are utterly at the mercy of the rhetoric of their notional "leaders."  Public-school children learn nothing but are persuaded that they are fully educated by the bosses of public teachers' unions -- moreover, the poor are connived into "investing" into state lotteries as a way of helping themselves and education, often in states which have "gambling addiction" government programs to help the poor.

Mrs. Clinton is in that same grand tradition of other leftist feminist icons.  Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, for example, had the wisdom to be born into one branch of the Roosevelt presidential family and to marry into the other branch.  Mrs. John Kennedy was born into an aristocratic European family and then married into a rich political family led by a patriarch who had wished to abandon Britain to Hitler in 1940.

All three of these women who so enchant leftists are were cheated on by their husbands -- in the cases of Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Kennedy, cheated on so flagrantly and widely that it took a deep sense of obedience to their husbands and a willingness to put their rights as wives and their pride as human beings aside.  We now have begun to understand just how deeply the spouses of Mrs. Clinton and Mrs. Kennedy sank in the muck of moral depravity: very young and naïve women serviced their husbands while these champions of women's rights bit their tongues and turned the other way -- or even, in Mrs. Clinton's case, accused the powerless young ladies victimized by her lord and master of lying.

Mrs. William Jefferson Clinton stands in the long and proud tradition of leftist women who railed against America or against the notional misogyny of Christianity while ignoring the stoning of girls in Iran for the offense of being gang-raped or the gendercide of girls in China and India caused by selective abortion of unborn girls -- and, in some parts of India, the calculated death by neglect of newborn girl-babies.

Conservatives have nothing to compete with these giants.  Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, whose rise in politics happened without a powerful husband or great wealth, are merely self-made women who rose to national prominence based upon intelligence, work, and persistence. There are a number of conservative Republican women, like Susana Martinez, Nikki Haley, and Mary Fallin, who rose to power by their own skill and now run states.

Phyllis Schlafly, whose book A Choice Not an Echo was decisive in gaining Goldwater the Republican nomination in 1964 and whose battle to defeat the so-called Equal Rights Amendment was almost unprecedented in American political history, fought with courage, eloquence, and grit -- not something leftists like to see in women.  Jeane Kirkpatrick was probably the most passionate and coherent voice in Reagan's plan to win the Cold War (she obviously thinks too much for a good feminist leftist).  Claire Boothe Luce, a brilliant writer, a congresswoman, an ambassador to two key posts, and stuff like that was also too smart for her own good.

What leftists like in Mrs. Clinton is her utter predictability, her liberation from independent thinking, and her loyal mouthing of leftist cant on every occasion.  Expect all the regiments of leftism to line up behind her -- she is just what they want in a woman.