Hillary imploding....
Posted on 06/18/2014 5:23:09 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Keep hope alive, says Jonathan Last. Not only has she been gaffe-ing up America’s airwaves — the “dead broke” remark, that gay-marriage meltdown interview with NPR, and some offhanded inanity about how smart the Russian reset was — but it’s all been happening against a backdrop of fiasco for American foreign policy.
How’d you like to be a former Secretary of State running on this record?
Obama — perhaps you’ve heard this? — got bin Laden. But other than that, his foreign policy record is disastrous: Libya, Egypt, Syria, the South China Sea, Crimea, Iraq, Afghanistan. It is difficult to find a spot on the globe that is better off today than when Obama took office. And yet Obama’s foreign policy is the only entry of substance on Hillary Clinton’s resume right now. Which means it will carry double the weight.
For Obama, Putin and Crimea are a mid-size political problem, ranked somewhere above the Keystone pipeline. For Clinton it’s an existential problem because foreign affairs are the only measures for her basic professional competence.
Think about it from the perspective of a Democratic voter: Hillary Clinton was wrong on Monica Lewinsky during the (Bill) Clinton years, wrong on gay marriage and Iraq during the Bush years, and now wrong on Putin and Syria and Egypt and the whole of American foreign policy during the Obama years. What has she ever been right on? And if you’re a Democratic voter, at some point you start to wonder, Can’t we do better?
Do you? Go watch this clip before you answer. My trust in the commentariat’s ability to gauge which gaffes are truly damaging among average voters and which aren’t is down to zero at this point, and yeah, I certainly include myself in “the commentariat.” The ultimate example of this, I think, is Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line during the 2012 campaign. Conservative media blew up over it, me included, to the point where it became a key theme at the GOP convention. Voters didn’t care, though, because most voters aren’t “builders.” They’re wage-earners. You could crap on entrepreneurs all day and they wouldn’t flinch, although it’d probably convince the Chamber of Commerce to pause from its amnesty campaigning for five minutes to write a check to your opponent.
My hunch is that nothing Hillary’s said this week has reduced her chances. It takes a big gaffe to register with average voters, and that gaffe has to reveal some perceived “deeper truth” about the candidate to have legs, I suspect. That’s why Romney’s “47 percent” comment outgrew the punditocracy and actually penetrated the electorate. It seemed to confirm the sense of him as a country-club Republican who looked down on the lower class. There’s potential, I guess, for Hillary’s “dead broke” comment and her stupid whining about how “brutal” American politics is to make her seem “out of touch,” but never forget that she’s got Bill around to give her a shot of blue-collar appeal when needed. If her last name weren’t “Clinton,” you might have something in drawing her as the consummate limousine liberal. As it is, I think it’s a glancing blow, nothing more, especially if the GOP ends up supporting the “out of touch” attack by, er, nominating a guy named Bush. As for the gay-marriage interview, it’s hard for me to believe liberals are going to give her too hard a time over any heresy knowing how difficult it is for a party to win the White House for three consecutive terms. Iraq is the perfect example. Her vote to invade helped Obama pull the upset in 2008, but no one thinks it’ll keep her from the nomination now. She’s clearly the strongest candidate Democrats have in an extremely difficult political climate. They’ll be prudent in deciding how severely to punish her for deviations from orthodoxy.
As for foreign policy, everything Last said is true — it looks like O’s going to toss her the keys to an agenda that’s been completely totaled. But … since when do voters elect presidents based on foreign policy? The only clear example I can think of recently is 2004 and it took 9/11 to make that happen. Even in 2008, when Obama ran as the anti-Bush and the GOP nominated the hawk di tutti hawks, McCain was competitive until the bottom dropped out on Wall Street. Unless Rand Paul shocks everyone in the primaries, the next Republican nominee is likely to run to Hillary’s right on foreign policy, which will set her up nicely to run a “no more Iraqs” campaign. (Repudiating her own vote for war will also rally the left.) That strategy might not work as well as it did in 2008, but barring any major terror attacks on the U.S., it’ll work well enough to neutralize most of the GOP’s foreign-policy criticism, especially if the economy picks up a bit in 2015-16 and gives her something else to talk about. You have two big problems running against her and neither has anything to do with the finer points of foreign policy. One: How do you neutralize Bill’s popularity? She’s going to run on his economic record, not O’s, and he’s going to help her — a lot, I’ll bet — with blue-collar voters. She may be a bad retail politician but he’s an exceptional one, and he’ll be campaigning as much as she will. What do you do about it? (Start by nominating a conspicuously blue-collar yourself, I’d guess.) Two: How do you neutralize the “it’s time for a woman” argument? That argument doesn’t depend on who’s gaffed worst or who was really responsible for security at the Benghazi consulate. My hunch is that the GOP will start this campaign with a single-digit lead among men and Hillary will start with a double-digit lead among women. Either we build heavily on the former or reduce the latter or we lose. Is the “dead broke” thing or Ukraine going to help do that?
Update: Tough but fair.
Just Karl @justkarl
Does it matter whether Hillary is imploding
when the GOP's big idea is a man in a squirrel suit?
2:52 PM - 18 Jun 2014
19 Retweets 10 favorites
She’s waiting for November when William Jefferson Webster “lil bubba” Clinton-Mezvinsky pops out and the media “granny gasm” erupts.
Hillary could keel over tomorrow, and the ‘RATS would coat her with shellac and drag her around the campaign trail for the next 2+ years. She’s running, and with the help of the lapdog media, she will crush any Rovian RINO the GOPe decide to run.
Hillary imploding....
Don’t kid yourselves.....she’s got about a 47% built-in vote.
Yes, let’s hope so. But be very suspicious when dealing with Statists of any stripe.
They could be doing all this now so that in a year and a half, if anyone brings it up, the state-run stenographers in the MSM can say, “We covered that a long time ago. She’s fine.”
On another note, the reason why the MSM seems to be turning on Obammie the Commie and what appears to be destroying his administration has one goal: to destroy Joe Biden.
The DNC can’t risk Biden running, so they have to sabotage the entire last two years of Obammie the Commie’s administration. When they are all destroyed, the playing field will be wide open, and the clear successor will be Mrs. Bill “I gave missile-guidance technology to the ChiComs” Clinton.
Either that, or the DNC has someone up their sleeve that will wipe the field (another woman, er wymn or however they spell it, perhaps).
I don’t know, Hitlery Rotten Clinton looks happy here:
http://themadjewess.com/2012/07/23/the-most-hideous-picture-of-hillary-rotten-clinton-ever/
My fears exactly. The RINOs (GOPe) are jonesing so hard to be praised as the neo-progressives that they cannot see that they have lost their base almost completely.
If a RINO runs, I’m voting third party. Yes, I know exactly what that means. But I won’t (literally) pinch my nose and vote for another McCain or Romney. The numbers of votes those GOPers did receive from the nose-pinchers sends the GOPe the false message that we’ll keep putting up with their progressive BS.
If they’re going to lose, they need to lose hard enough to be buried forever.
I think she waiting for first grandbaby make her more family oriented to people
Come on you can’t say jack about grandma to be
Unless you goofing on Hillary
I don’t see Hillary knitting booties for Chelesa
Perhaps a wymn that’s also an injun ... or at least claims to be?
She was stuck in the shower all through those horrific hours of Benghazi.
No, only the American people can implode, and in that case “What difference does it make?”
The dims managed to steal the reelection of baraq in ‘12.
They have their mechanisms in place to steal the next presidential election. The party and the party’s media are not even talking about anyone else except Hillary. Since the party has figured out how to rig an election, she will probably be the next person in the position of President.
But know this, she will be much more dangerous than baraq. She doesn’t golf and she isn’t distracted like him with basketball brackets and ESPN. She doesn’t vacation like him. She is on a mission and is very determined. She will be the destruction of us all.
Based on all that, the GOPe will run a Christie or a jeb bush and we will all be be forked big time.
see my tag line.
“I really don’t see how any likely Republican candidate beats Hillary, especially if the low information voters are jonesing to put the first woman in office.”
I was flipping channels (a frequent habit of mine during commercials) and happened across Jesse Watters on BOR interviewing women holding up Hillary for Prez signs. One or two said they wanted her elected because she was a woman, when others were asked about Benghazi, they had a deer in the headlights look - - didn’t have a clue, and, IIRC one or two said they didn’t know who he was (though that might have been another interview - I might be mixing them up). Talk about LIV - or, perhaps totally uninformed voters as it was in NYC, and, I suspect if they read anything it’s the NYT.
I bet the media will be going after her for being so rich. Just like they did to Mitt Romney.
Right?
Romney limited himself to around $200 million when similar hedge fund managers are normally billionaires. The Clinton family has much more than Milt.
I can not disagree. I DO believe the Hildebeast will be worse than the Obungler. Can you say gas chambers and ovens? It wasn’t too long ago, I would have laughed at that. Now, I am not so sure, especially when those dip sticks have already said they expect 25 to 30 million Americans will be deemed unacceptable for the re education camps. The only thing I will slightly disagree on, is your tag line. I do not think the rat party is NOW the CPUSA. I think the rat party has been the CPUSA for quite a long time already. I wish my tagline meant something, but hey, maybe they will start selling ice cubes in Hell, and it will.
I wish I could say that I disagree with you, but I can’t. I also believe that the Democrats perfected their re-election technique in 2012 and that it will be in place in 2014 and 2016.
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