Watching the Democrats’ convention lionize Hillary Clinton gave me some sense of the way Moses must have cringed when he looked from Mount Sinai and saw his relatives and friends dancing around the image of a golden calf.

I’m a lifelong conservative who has to admit there are good people in that convention, somewhere.  So what is so lacking or misunderstood in their lives as Americans that these Democrats feel compelled to pay homage to this woman?  It’s not as if folks don’t understand who she is – absent a single generous bone, grasping, a proven serial liar and character assassin endlessly contemptuous of those who can’t answer back, and with her only admitted interest in this great republic, and the Democratic Party itself, the power that may be hers as president.

So I guess it’s much as Dorothy Rabinowitz once wrote: the reason Democrats do what they do is that if they don’t, they don’t eat.  In previous years, the largest single component was unionized public school teachers, but their party is also a refuge of race hustlers, government employees, dole recipients, trial lawyers, flaks and conspiracy theorist flakes, bankers being enriched by the Federal Reserve, liberal arts college professors, and businessmen whose only asset is the control of a federal stock number.  Anyone, that is, who demands his share of tax dollars or preferential treatment under law and so will debase himself before whatever graven image he has to in order to keep those benefits flowing.

We can of course console ourselves with the thought that if not Hillary Clinton, the Democrats would be gathering behind some other odious figure.  After all, locusts have to swarm before they can launch themselves at fields not yet stripped, hyenas need numbers before they can take down a wounded buffalo, bears fish the salmon rivers in groups, which drives the fish into each other’s paws, and you never, ever find a termite munching on your house all by its lonesome. 

Still, I believe that the Democrats might have overdone it this time around.  Ran the engine too hot too long without an oil change.  Hillary Clinton is so over.  The wench has a stench you couldn’t dissipate with ten thousand celebrity endorsements or a million balloons. 

It only remains to find out how many voters don’t mind the smell.

Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD.  See it here.  He lives and writes in the colonial-era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here, and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com.