Crawling across broken glass: Why Democrats do not care about Hillary's scandals

If you follow conservatives on Twitter, rarely a day passes when you don't see a tweet like this one:

Prediction: there'll be more than two dozen news stories between today & November 2016 about Hillary Clinton that would end a normal career.

— Dan McLaughlin (@baseballcrank) June 8, 2015

True, dat. The Clintons weather scandals better than North Face weathers weather, surely in part because they have already survived so many. People have settled their opinions, expect the Clintons to behave in a certain way and their opponents to react in a certain way, and when both sides follow the script exactly nobody changes their mind. One either cares or does not care. Don't believe me? Google "Clinton scandals fatigue" and see how many stories there have been over so many years.

There is another consideration that reinforces these tendencies for the 2016 election. The Republicans control both houses of Congress and have a critical edge on the Supreme Court heading in to 2016, and liberals are literally terrified of a GOP sweep of the federal government, which terror is only amplified by contemplating what a Republican could do with Barack Obama's approach to regulatory power. To Democrats a GOP sweep would fulfill the apocalypse, and they would crawl across broken glass, eat corporate food, or vote for Elmer Fudd to prevent it. The Republicans could nominate Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and the Democrats could put up Jimmy Carter and James Buchanan and virtually every liberal would still vote for the Democrats in 2016 "because SCOTUS" or some other tweetable reason. The election will be decided in maybe seven states, and in most of those by turning out the base rather than by recruiting the declining population of centrist ticket-splitters. Therefore, the value, such as it is, in talking about Hillary's scandals is to stimulate the same fear on the right as currently prevails on the left. Which, of course, changes no minds, and will lead to another president with no mandate for governing the country other than the bare fact of victory.