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
Let’s hope so. do Mr. Creosote proud.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhbHTjMLN5c
If the Republican candidate is a Governor, and since most of the Governors that are likely to run are pro-amnesty in one form or another, the Republicans risk keeping the diehard conservatives at home.
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.
Go read Ted Cruz’s bio, remembering that he is ONLY 43 years old. I’ll wait.
HE got OBL?
No, he prevented us getting OBL, who we knew where he was, until his own people forced him, then he ran to the head of the crowd to lead the parade.
His bio suggests he would make a wonderful Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
If by "imploding" you include digging an ever-deepening hole for herself, and going through all her shoes due to "hoof-in-mouth" disease, then yeah...
She is imploding and exploding and disintegrating...
And even if he did, do we know that at that point OBL was all that important to Al Qaeda either in reality or even symbolically?
Her only hope is to strike a Faustian bargain with the Chicago Mob.
And I’m not so sure they are willing to do it.
Even though he started from nowhere, he still got enough boost from the MSM that he got into office.
However truly worthless, or even hazardous, Hillary's record is, the perception is that she held important positions at an important time (i.e. during the administration of the first black president) and so she must be qualified to be Prez. This plus the MSM lies we know will be told and retold make me almost certain that Hillary will be our next Prez.
She will be better than Obama, but that's not saying much.
The Hillabeast is acting as if her primary counselor is Plugs Biden a/k/a “The Gaff-o-matic”.
Nope. We really don’t. And I personally really doubt he survived Tora Bora. If he did, his kidney issues were not conductive to life on the run from the planet.
But since no one wants to think about it, the lies they promote can be used against them just as easily.
Cut her some slack. It takes her longer to shower and style than her male opponents. She said it last night.
I have been saying it for years. I hope I am wrong, but never underestimate the stupidity of the American people. If she wins, and I believe she will, the destruction that the Obungler started, will be completed under the Hidebeast.
I hope so.
I guess we can hope that the third time will be the charm.
If she is should she be moved a safe distance from the planet?
She is really formidable, in theory, and a great pick for the Dems, in theory. In reality, she’s a train wreck, and always has been. Her numbers always go up when she isn’t heard from. If the GOP were at all competent, she wouldn’t have a chance.
People are tired of the Clintons and she’s old. She can’t fake the cool factor that got Obama elected and she has a record of incompetence in the public eye. All she can run on is her uterus.
I expect to hear her talk about wanting tattoos, pop music and to weep a little in public as she power-walks away from the flaming failure that is Obama’s presidency.
There is that "if" word agin. Our only hope is the "if" word? I have a bad feeling about it.
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