If you listen to the punditocracy both left and right, you would think Hillary Clinton as the next president was a forgone conclusion and elections a mere formality.

 
Now where have we heard that kind of talk before? If you answered “2008”, you win the $64,000 question.

Let’s for a moment set aside from the fact that the Hillary coronation was supposed to happen in 2008, before a no-name first-term Senator from the cesspool of American politics upended her sure-thing and relegated her to being yesterday’s news.

She blew her moment by behaving entitled to it and not getting into gear when Comrade Obama caught up to her in the polls. Now, we’re being told that it’s her moment all over again. Let’s not get played for suckers, again, people.

Now you may say that the urge to elect the first woman president will help her.

It might. But then again, the Left has a new darling. That’s right, folks, Hillary will not have exclusive domain of being the first woman president because the fake Indian from Massachusetts is out there, trying to outflank Hillary from the Left.

The only reason Elizabeth Warren, aka the fake Indian, is even a half-way plausible presidential contender is because the media has duped voters with Hillary as Centrist meme. This in spite of the fact that Hillary tried to nationalize healthcare before it was popular.

As Hugh Hewitt has said on air, Hillary is the grandmother of Obamacare.

But all this misses the real reason that Hillary Clinton has no real chance in 2016: history.

 
If you go back through the history of Democrat Party presidential contenders to the last 50 years, outside of sitting and former Vice President, Democrat primary voters tend to eschew their known qualities and go for the shiny object.

This trend began in 1972 when assumed frontrunner Ed Muskie (VP candidate in 1968) saw his candidacy collapse and the Democrats nominated relatively unknown South Dakota Senator George McGovern. The first time out, however, this cost the Democrats the White House in the first ever 49-state landslide loss in the Electoral College.

Four years later, the Democrats successfully nominated and elected another unknown, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, over the known quantity Mo Udall (House member from Arizona). The main difference between the unknown McGovern and the unknown Carter is that Carter cast himself as an outsider and a political centrist and was able to knock off Gerald Ford.

And with that, the Democrat fascination with what I call “the shiny object candidate” began.

From Michael Dukakis in 1988 to Bill Clinton to John Kerry (who served in Vietnam) to the current Comrade-in-Chief, each nominating contest that didn’t include an incumbent president or a sitting or former Vice President elevated a previously-unknown Democrat to the ranks of the party’s standard-bearer. And each of them did what they could to conceal how radically Left they truly were.

Why does this have anything to do with Hillary?

Precisely because she isn’t a fresh face or a political unknown. She’s not a “shiny object candidate” but a Washington insider whose candidacy would be DOA but for the fact that she is the wife of an impeached felon.

Of course not having an actual resume isn’t Hillary’s downfall for the Democrats (which is an entirely different problem), but the fact she’s old, inspires no one, and has no convincing claim to be elected in the first place.

Hillary will receive a challenge for the Democrat nomination in 2016. She will not breeze on through as so many have presumed. She’s not the golden boy anymore, she’s not the inevitable one this time out. She’s been the presumed frontrunner and heir-apparent to the Oval Office since she became the wife of the only impeached president of the 20th century.

She didn’t run in 2004, and when she threw her hat into the ring in 2008, she was defeated by Obama and quite handily, I might add. If she couldn’t take it in the year everyone assumed she would, why do we think she’s a shoe-in eight years later?

Forget the fact she’s almost 70, the fact she’s been around in the public eye since 1992 doesn’t help her pose as the “shiny object candidate”.

Democrats have a propensity to throw their known quantities under the bus, and if history is any indication, Hillary will be under said bus before the 2016 primaries are over.