In the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the country was tipping into the abyss. Liberals had waged war on the normal people for most of the decade. A vast expansion of the federal government, race riots, nation building in Asia and the cultural revolution left normal people wondering if America was going to survive. In less than a decade the country had gone from the middle-class prosperity of Eisenhower to the madness of LBJ.

Americans have a habit of using elections to address previous electoral mistakes. In 1960, a peaceful and prosperous country decided it was time to pass the torch to a new generation and passed on Dick Nixon, the sitting Vice President. Three years later Kennedy got two in the hat from a communist, putting LBJ in the White House. Mostly out of grief for the death of Kennedy, the public elected Johnson in a landslide the following year.

Whether it was suicidal guilt or a desire to gain respect from the Yankee elite, Johnson set off on a five year rampage through the American culture. The massive expansion of the welfare state, the unleashing of black violence, degenerate youth culture and nation building in Southeast Asia had many people thinking it was a colossal mistake voting for Kennedy over Nixon. Who knows how things would have unfolded if the Chicago mob had not fixed the 1960 election, but it could not have been worse.

Nixon was no one’s idea of a popular figure. Buckley conservatives hated his social liberalism and liberals hated his red baiting. Yankees hated his decidedly downscale tactics and aesthetic. Even so, Nixon was willing to punch the hippies and he represented a line in the sand middle Americans could respect. He was also a staunch anti-communist, but willing to put an end to the pointless Vietnam War. Tricky Dick was a low-risk chance to stop the bleeding so he won in a landslide.

I’ve often compared Hillary Clinton to Dick Nixon. In 1968, Nixon had been a public figure for over three decades. Here in 2016, Hillary Clinton is now halfway through her third decade in public life. Of course, the ethical comparisons are obvious, even though Nixon was a boy scout compared to the Clintons. Tricky Dick played rough when it came to politics, but he was never a crook. Still, like Nixon, the Clintons play rough in politics and are willing to cut deals with anyone.

If you look at the broad outlines of the Clinton campaign in 2016, you see some hints of the Nixon campaign of 1968. She wanted to run as the solid, stable choice that would curb the excesses of the Obama years. Hillary may be a crook, but she was going to get the race mongers and foreign weirdos out of government. Whatever her ethical and moral defects, Clinton would have been the better choice in 2008 when the country, high on the narcotic of racial justice, elected Obama

The problem is that Hillary is attached to the weirdos and lunatics that have been running wild the last eight years. Her cynical attempts to position herself as a restoration of sober governance is ridiculous, given that she worked in the Obama administration for six years. There’s also the fact that Obama’s Attorney General is the only thing standing between Hillary and an orange jumpsuit. It’s simply laughable to think of Hillary as anything but a fun house mirror version of Obama.

It’s why they have shifted gears and decided to run Hillary as the defender of female virtue against the boorish womanizer, Donald Trump. The campaign is now selling vagina cards and the liberal media is running stories about Trump’s wildly successful sex life. The hope is they can pivot off Trump’s alleged hostility toward woman and make the election a referendum on the awfulness of white men. Instead of a charming black guy promising vengeance, it will be an old lesbian.

That’s the irony of this election. Hillary started her life in politics as a minor staffer on a Congressional committee hounding Nixon. Like all liberals of her generation, she defined herself in opposition to Nixon. Now she finds herself as a post-modern caricature of Nixon, but at odds with those same forces. She’s both the square representing the status quo and the radical weirdo that freaks out the squares. She is the worst of both sides of late 1960’s politics.

Compounding her dilemma is the fact that Trump is a master at deflection. In the primary, he made the campaign about one candidate after another, rather than a referendum on Trump. It was Bush, then Fiorina, then Rubio and finally Cruz. Worse yet, Trump’s critiques reinforce his general theme of being a restoration of commonsense over the deranged fads of an out of touch ruling class. This makes him the worst possible candidate for Clinton.

As the saying goes, a week is a lifetime in politics and we are five and a half months from the election. The Trotsky wing of the GOP is still plotting a third party candidate to try and derail Trump. The Progressive media will coordinate with the Clinton campaign on the war on women nonsense. Trump has made blunders so he is capable of saying or doing something stupid this summer. Still, all of the trends are working against Clinton and she has proven to be a fantastically bad candidate.

She’s going to need a miracle to win.