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 Americas airwaves the dead broke remark, that gay-marriage meltdown interview with NPR, and some offhanded inanity about how smart the Russian reset was but its all been happening against a backdrop of fiasco for American foreign policy.
Howd you like to be a former Secretary of State running on this record?
Obama perhaps youve 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 Obamas foreign policy is the only entry of substance on Hillary Clintons 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 its 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 youre a Democratic voter, at some point you start to wonder, Cant we do better?
Do you? Go watch this clip before you answer. My trust in the commentariats ability to gauge which gaffes are truly damaging among average voters and which arent is down to zero at this point, and yeah, I certainly include myself in the commentariat. The ultimate example of this, I think, is Obamas you didnt 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 didnt care, though, because most voters arent builders. Theyre wage-earners. You could crap on entrepreneurs all day and they wouldnt flinch, although itd 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 Hillarys 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. Thats why Romneys 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. Theres potential, I guess, for Hillarys dead broke comment and her stupid whining about how brutal American politics is to make her seem out of touch, but never forget that shes got Bill around to give her a shot of blue-collar appeal when needed. If her last name werent Clinton, you might have something in drawing her as the consummate limousine liberal. As it is, I think its 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, its 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 itll keep her from the nomination now. Shes clearly the strongest candidate Democrats have in an extremely difficult political climate. Theyll 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 Os going to toss her the keys to an agenda thats 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 Hillarys 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., itll work well enough to neutralize most of the GOPs 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 Bills popularity? Shes going to run on his economic record, not Os, and hes going to help her a lot, Ill bet with blue-collar voters. She may be a bad retail politician but hes an exceptional one, and hell be campaigning as much as she will. What do you do about it? (Start by nominating a conspicuously blue-collar yourself, Id guess.) Two: How do you neutralize the its time for a woman argument? That argument doesnt depend on whos 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
The Democrats won the last two presidential elections by running a candidate that Americans felt sorry for. They will keep running that play until it doesn’t work. How much sympathy did Hillary get with her “we were broke” comment? The Democrats may just have seen the anointed replacement go down.
OBL died long ago, as one taxi driver up here told me, they have hundreds. The original died a ways back, but there’s always more to spring up. They’ll never let that legend die.
As for Hillary imploding... well one can hope.
I’ve said for a long time that voting isn’t going to fix anything. I don’t think people have the parts to fix it though.
I’m almost willing to bet those Hillary supporter’s do know about Benghazi and that their deer-in-the-headlights-who’s-Ben-Ghazi? response is a practiced one designed to befuddle interviewer and audience alike while the cheering for Hillary! The First Woman President! goes on.
Hillary Clinton will not run for POTUS in 2016!!! Both her interviews on CNN & Fox News Channel had horrible viewer numbers...way below the everyday numbers for their daily time slots that she did her interviews. Her book is now tanking big time on Amazon.com!!!
Hillary Clinton is toast....no....burnt toast!!! End of story!!!
Her cattle futures bribe, her Rose Law Firm corruption, her radical student days, her part in the corruption in Arkansas, her affair with and then murder of Vincent Foster, her deals with the Communist Chinese have all been documented.
However, the MSM always praises her and lies for her.
The flaw in this analysis is, most of them do not think at all. She's a 'D' that's all that matters. As a bonus, she's a she, and isn't it time we had a woman president (never mind that for all the hype of being the smartest woman in the world she's actually dumb as a box of rocks politically speaking, is an egomaniac, and power-hungry, and I believe, carries a huge chip on her shoulder for having to put up with her philandering lying horny-hick-from-Hope husband)?
I agree 100%
Music to me Irish ears. . .
I'll grant this, but he did it with the intelligence gathered as a result of his predecessor's policies, most if not all of which he opposed.
Not only has Hillary Clinton’s stint as Secretary of State turned into a total disaster (and will be used against her in the Presidential run!), but now there are whispers that her age—69 just one month before Election Day 2016—could be a liability when her potential Republican opponent could be 8-14 years younger than her!
“She will be better than Obama, but that’s not saying much.”
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I suspect it is saying TOO much in that I am at a total loss to say in what way she would be better. Even if I agreed I would say “less bad”, rather than better. I prefer to use better in a context such as “Blackberry cobbler is better than Peach cobbler”, not in a context such as “being bitten by an Eastern diamondback is better than being shot between the eyes” which is the sort of comparison you are making between Obama and Hillary. Anyone who thinks there is anything good about either is severely deluded and it is obvious that many if not a majority of Americans currently fit that category.
One should never mention "Hillary" and "consummate" in the same sentence paragraph article lifetime.
“If the GOP were at all competent, she wouldnt have a chance.”
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A very obvious truism which leads me to think maybe, just maybe, the GOP is not nearly as incompetent as they pretend to be but are actually just acting as a foil for the Democrat party which has replaced the American Communist Party in function but not in name. The left needs someone to point the finger of blame at, without the GOP in its role as the “stupid party” they would have no one else to blame their own failure on. “Bush’s fault” would have no meaning. Don’t just brush me off, think about it before you tell me I am crazy. Picture the left holding every office in the entire country without opposition from another major party. How would they manage to cover their failure?
I think it is obvious by now that, disregarding the rare exception, the majority of Republicans are NOT acting as an opposition party, it is all like a good cop, bad cop routine and the country is divided over which is perceived as the good cop, of course in reality they have a beer together later and laugh at how stupid we are to fall for their game.
This was supposed to be a constitutional republic, in reality it now functions as almost a pure democracy, there IS NO “rule of law”, whatever a majority can be claimed to support goes, regardless. In a pure democracy the people get exactly the government that THE MAJORITY deserves and all the rest have to suffer along with the majority, that is what is happening in this country with the caveat that if the majority does not support tyranny in the voting booth at this point, “What difference does it make?” The answer is very little, there is a very efficient vote fraud system in place to make sure that the status quo continues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7M-7LkvcVw
I stand corrected.
Hilliary always has that look of someone who’s about to have a house dropped on them.
She would not be “better than (n)obama”. No LIB/DIM would be better than any other LIB/DIM. They all hate you and your family...and hate your Freedom.
I’d prefer her implode October 2016
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