Unready for Hillary

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is in trouble. The crisis follows revelations that 1) the Clinton Foundation, which finances her undeclared campaign for president, took money from foreign governments, some of them unsavory, while she was running U.S. foreign policy, and that 2) she handled all her emails--most of which had to have been classified--via a private server in her New York estate.  With more to come.

Hillary was poised this year to run a campaign that featured her popular husband, reminding us that before the Obama era with its sleep-walked economy and intense partisan warfare reducing Democratic officeholders to historic low numbers, America lived the bipartisan, Clinton-led, high-growth ‘90s. After Obama’s failed presidency, Clinton would offer throwback to a happier time.

Now Hillary, jarringly, has instead recalled the ‘90s the country preferred to forget--the Clinton scandals, the slippery legalisms, the outright lies, stuff people had been happy to move past with “no drama Obama.” It’s big that Clinton inadvertently chucked a major rationale for her campaign--nostalgia.

Don’t, however, read media attention to Clinton’s errors as evidence Democrats have written her off. Think back instead to 2012's first presidential debate between Obama and Mitt Romney, won handily by Romney. Then too, the media was all over a Democrat’s poor performance. Why? Because 1) liberals desperately needed a big correction, and 2) there was time to engineer a fix.

So it is with Clinton’s current bad press (see TIME cover above). There’s time.