What’s wrong with Hillary

The presidential campaign here in the land hymned by one of its earliest immigrants as a shining ‘city on a hill’ looks more and more likely to boil down to electing Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton.

It is of course possible that the party of Lincoln and Reagan will not go completely off its meds and nominate Mr Trump. It’s possible, too, that the wretched FBI agents tasked with reading Mrs Clinton’s 55,000 private emails will experience a Howard Carter/King Tut’s tomb moment and find one instructing Sidney Blumenthal to offer Putin another 20 per cent of US uranium production in return for another $2.5 million donation to the Clinton Foundation, plus another $500,000 speech in Moscow. Absent such, Mrs Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. As we say here: deal with it.

Only last summer, her goose seemed all but cooked. Every day she offered another Hillary-ous explanation for why as Secretary of State she required two Blackberries linked to unclassified servers. Eventually this babbling brook of prevarication became so tedious that even her Marxist challenger, Comrade Bernie Sanders of the Vermont Soviet, was moved to thump the debate podium and proclaim: ‘I’m sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!’ (He has since backtracked, declaring himself now deeply interested in her damn emails.)

Drums, meanwhile, were beating along the Potomac for VP Joe Biden to jump into the race, prompted by a truly heart-wrenching story that his splendid son Beau had begged him to do so on his deathbed. This narrative was corrected; which is to say, Beau did not in fact beg his father to run. But by this point, Biden’s Hamlet turn had run on a bit too long and he withdrew — to heaving sighs of relief in Camp Clinton.

As her path to White House cleared, the Republicans became infatuated with a blow-dried blowhard real-estate developer who makes Ozymandias sound like Little Nell, and an affable but strange neuro-surgeon doppelgänger of Chance the Gardener.