The Clintons and a long goodbye to Arkansas

This has been a bad year for dreams of dynasties. The Bush dynasty has been dismantled with Jeb, who was the first favored son, writing finis to the family dream of a trifecta.

Hillary Clinton, who started plotting her path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. when she was a law student at Yale, took a detour through Arkansas and if she still wants to be a president will have to settle for Wellesley, or Smith or one of the other Seven Sisters. But it won’t be anything in Arkansas.

Even with her borrowed family name, her brief but famous law practice in Little Rock and other ties to the state, her election day was particularly dismal in Arkansas. She won just under 34 percent of the popular vote, winning only eight of the state’s 75 counties. She won the vote in Little Rock and surrounding Pulaski County, still a stronghold of what passes for liberalism in Arkansas, and a handful of Delta counties along the Mississippi River, which are predominantly black. The Delta, the most prosperous region of the state only a generation ago, has been hollowed out by the flight of blacks to Chicago and white landowners to retirement elsewhere.

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