Heck, maybe she is presidential. “For me, this is pretty straightforward,” Hillary Clinton tells Mika Brzezinski when the Morning Joe co-host asks the Democrats quasi-front-runner for her “core message — which touches off a rambling, three-minute version of a State of the Union speech. Instead of identifying a core message that would explain the necessity of a Hillary Clinton presidency, she offers a generic list of Democratic Party agenda items mixed with enough clichés and platitudes to float a navy (via NewsAlert):

“I still don’t understand your message,” Brzezinski said to preface the question. After this, no one understands the message, nor why Hillary would be indispensable for the nation as president.

Or maybe she isn’t presidential. Ed Driscoll recalls the debacle of another Democrat who couldn’t articulate a clear reason to support his candidacy:

Ted Kennedy, call your office! Shades of 1979 when, “As the cameras rolled, [CBS’s Roger Mudd] popped the now-famous question: Why do you want to be president? Even if he had not been a Kennedy, what followed was stunning: a hesitant, rambling and incoherent nonanswer; it seemed to go on forever without arriving anywhere.”

The difference between 1979 and 2016 is that Democrats had an incumbent president running for a second term on whom to rely — although that didn’t work out too well for them, either. Right now it’s a choice between the Kennedyesque figure from the past running for power for the sake of power, or a self-professed socialist who’s even older than the figure from the past. The only other option within reach would be the Vice President who’s been in Washington longer than any millennial voter has been alive, and who is also older than Hillary. Don’t expect Democrats today to dispense with Hillary in the way they dispensed with Kennedy in 1979.

If so, however … maybe the whole party will go on forever without arriving anywhere. Or at the very least, it’s not the only time-loop problem Democrats and Hillary have, as NJ’s Michael Mishak explains:

When Hil­lary Clin­ton launched her pres­id­en­tial bid last year, she and her ad­visers were de­term­ined to avoid the mis­takes of her last cam­paign. They favored small meet-and-greets over large ral­lies. They drilled down on the lib­er­al causes an­im­at­ing the Demo­crat­ic base. They even de­ployed the can­did­ate to late-night talk shows to high­light The Real Hil­lary.

But as the first nom­in­at­ing con­test ap­proaches, Clin­ton seems to be caught in a polit­ic­al time warp, buf­feted by the same head­winds that felled her 2008 cam­paign as she seeks to blunt the rise of Sen. Bernie Sanders. …

For his part, Sanders is chan­nel­ing Obama’s past bid, pledging to lead a polit­ic­al re­volu­tion while paint­ing Clin­ton as an es­tab­lish­ment politi­cian—a mes­sage that is res­on­at­ing deeply with polit­ic­al in­de­pend­ents and young people, the same kind of voters who boos­ted Obama eight years ago. Sanders’s aides have sug­ges­ted they would mount a sim­il­ar state-by-state del­eg­ate chase to clinch the nom­in­a­tion.

“It could be that the in­ev­it­able can­did­ate for the Demo­crat­ic nom­in­a­tion may not be so in­ev­it­able today,” Sanders said this week.

As Peter Allen once sang, everything old is new again.