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| Hillary Clinton |
I've always been a huge boxing fan. Like most boxing fans, I held Mike Tyson in high regard. I had him ranked as one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. Then a couple of years ago I was watching a documentary on Iron Mike's career. The documentary detailed every fight he ever fought. As the documentary progressed, I was certainly impressed by Tyson's awesome display of power and aggressiveness as he knocked out foe after foe. Then something dawned on me. None of the guys that Mike Tyson knocked out were great boxers. Most of them were, in boxing parlance, bums. His first loss was actually to a boxing bum, Buster Douglas. As far as I can tell, Douglas was the first boxer to actually hit Mike Tyson. He did beat Michael Spinks, who was really a light heavyweight. But the only really good heavyweights Mike Tyson fought were Evander Holyfield, Lennox Lewis, and Andrew Golota. He didn't beat any of them. It turned out Iron Mike had a glass jaw. He couldn't take a punch.
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| Rudy Giuliani |
What does any of this have to do with Hillary Clinton? I've observed Hillary Clinton's entire political career, which for the purposes of this post I will start with her time as First Lady of the United States. I watched her run for the Senate in New York. While many thought her primary opponent would be heavyweight contender Rudy Giuliani, he ducked the fight and instead she ran against Rick Lazio who could be the Buster Douglas of politics except he never had a big win. In boxing parlance, Lazio would be a bum. I watched Hillary perform admirably in the Senate. In her Senate re-election campaigns, she quickly dispensed two more political bums, Jonathan Tasini and John Spencer, with the same ease that Mike Tyson defeated Michael Spinks. By the time she announced that she would run for President in 2008, she was every bit as intimidating as Tyson was that night in Tokyo before he fought Buster Douglas. I vividly remember a politically active friend of mine asking me to help raise money for a then relatively unknown first term Senator from Illinois named Barrack Obama. Even though I really liked what I had heard from Obama I asked my friend what was the point? I told him Hillary was inevitable. If he could show me any way that Obama could possibly defeat Hillary I would raise the money. He couldn't. We know the rest of the story. The relatively unknown first term Senator, in boxing terms, knocked her out.
But Hillary made an impressive comeback as President Obama's Secretary of State. She had a few hiccups along the way but left that office appearing to be at the top of her old "Iron Mike" form. By the time she announced that she would be a candidate for President in 2016 she seemed so inevitable that she drew no serious contenders to run against her. The two sacrificial lambs that threw their hats in the ring were Martin O'Malley and Bernie Sanders. Clinton was expected to mow both down easily, and O'Malley did go down early in the first round. But Bernie Sanders not only refuses to go down, he has started to hit Clinton. His win in Michigan last night was his hardest punch yet, and it appears to have the Clinton campaign staggering.
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| Donald Trump |
As dominating as Hillary Clinton has appeared to be as a politician, she has yet to defeat a heavyweight. Let's be honest, Bernie Sanders is no heavyweight. No one gave him any chance to compete at the beginning of this process and hardly anybody who covers politics for a living gives him any chances of winning the nomination. Yet he's still in the ring, still throwing punches, and still connecting. Meanwhile, awaiting the winner of this contest is a true heavyweight the likes of which we've never seen before, Donald Trump. So it will be interesting to me to see how Hillary reacts. If you will remember, when Mike Tyson realized that he couldn't beat Evander Holyfield he resorted to street fighting, biting Holyfield's ear during the fight. When Hillary Clinton intentionally misled a national television audience in Detroit during a debate by saying that Bernie Sanders had voted against the auto bailout, a claim that almost all political observers say is false, to me it was the equivalent of biting Bernie's ear during a fight that she sensed she might be losing.
So where does Hillary go from here. We know what happened to Mike Tyson. He went from being feared to being hated to being pitied to actually becoming a sympathetic figure. He had his own fairly successful one man show and has made bit appearances in movies and TV sitcoms. In my opinion Mike Tyson is not only the most overrated boxer of all time, but he may be the most overrated athlete in the history of sports. He never beat a good heavyweight, not once. I'm not saying that's Hillary's future. She does have an incredible resume and she has shown a remarkable ability to leverage that resume into revenue, so I don't see the one woman show in her future. But as a lifetime boxing fan I can tell you that once the world discovers you have a glass jaw, your best days are usually behind you. Time will tell.
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