The most viable Democratic candidate running right now is Hillary Clinton. She is going to win the nomination, and she will run in the general with little to no negative coverage from the press. This will put whoever the Republican candidate is at a disadvantage. However, that does not mean Hillary Clinton is the best that the Democratic Party can put forward by virtue of her net positives. She is simply the best they can put forward simply because she’s all they’ve got.

Nick Kristof of the New York Times tried recently to sell Hillary as just freakin’ awesome, using PolitiFact and statistics to make it look that way. Here’s what he wrote:

PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize winning fact checking site, calculates that of the Clinton statements it has examined, 95 percent are either true or mostly true.

That’s more than twice as high as the percentages for any of the other candidates, with 46 percent for Bernie Sanders’s, 12 percent for Trump’s, 23 percent for Ted Cruz’s and 33 percent for John Kasich’s. Here we have a rare metric of integrity among candidates, and it suggest that contrary to popular impressions, Clinton is far more honest and trustworthy than her peers.

Whoa. Those are some awesome numbers in Hillary’s favor. Even when you take into account that PolitiFact is as horribly skewed to the Left as every other major media outlet, 95 percent true is a solid record for Hillary.

Unfortunately, that is not even close to what PolitiFact said. The following appeared underneath Kristof’s column:

Correction: April 23, 2016: An earlier version of this column misstated some of the percentages of true statements as judged by PolitiFact.

And here is what Kristof’s column now says:

PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking site, calculates that of the Clinton statements it has examined, 50 percent are either true or mostly true.

That compares to 49 percent for Bernie Sanders’s, 9 percent for Trump’s, 22 percent for Ted Cruz’s and 52 percent for John Kasich’s. Here we have a rare metric of integrity among candidates, and it suggests that contrary to popular impressions, Clinton is relatively honest — by politician standards.

We went from “95 percent are either true or mostly true” to “50 percent are true or mostly true.” Kristof was 45 percent off the mark. They also had to change “Clinton is far more honest and trustworthy than her peers” to “Clinton is relatively honest – by politician standards.” The only way Hillary Clinton is “far more honest and trustworthy than her peers” is if by “peers,” Kristof was referring to other senile senior citizens, and even then most of them would have to have very advanced dementia.

This revision, which was reported by Powerline’s John Hayward, is exactly why the Democrats are in trouble. Someone who is seen as barely honest and only truthful about 50 percent of the time is the very best they can hope for.

And we’re sitting here squandering what should be a cakewalk in November.