HILLARY CLINTON: WELL-KNOWN CANDIDATE OF UNKNOWN POSITIONS

[Geee]

American Spectator:

The fact Hillary Clinton is well known is allowing her to keep her policy positions unknown. Thus far her 2016 strategy completely contradicts 2008’s — then Hillary was a policy diva, today we must divine where she stands. The danger in Clinton’s short-term approach is it threatens to increase the long-held questions many Americans have about her.

 

After decades of seeing her in the brightest public spotlight, we feel we know Hillary Clinton all too well, but increasingly we find that we do not know her positions at all. It was not always thus.

 

In 2008, she ran for president as a policy expert nonpareil. Her campaign captured her image in a famous ad: “It’s 3 AM and your children are safe and asleep. But there’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. Something is happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call.”

 

Of course, hindsight is 20-20. Today, it is not lost on her that policy positions did not help — and one in particular, her Iraq War vote, cost her dearly in 2008 versus a comparative unknown. So this time when again facing relative unknowns, she is willing to let the phone keep right on ringing into voicemail. Presumably, she will return these calls once in the White House, but not until then.

[Valin]

[Geee]

Hillary Clinton May Have to Scorch the Earth to Win the White House

 

Polls at this point in the presidential race do not mean a thing. That is, of course, except when they do. The latest Quinnipiac University poll of three swing states – Virginia, Iowa, and Colorado – is one such poll. In all three states, the poll shows that Clinton’s favorability ratings have plummeted, voters no longer trust her, and, against three of the GOP’s top-tier candidates, she is losing. No, polls at this stage of the race are not predictive, but they do set expectations and they focus the minds of the donor class who don’t want to throw good money after bad. If this survey is a portent of things to come, it foreshadows a general election campaign that will make the president’s brutal, no-holds-barred 2012 reelection effort appear the height of cordiality by comparison.

It’s not the head-to-head matchups in Quinnipiac’s latest survey that should trouble Democrats – it’s the rapid deterioration of Clinton’s image among voters. Even in the state that proved definitively for the left that demography is destiny, Virginia, majorities have an unfavorable opinion of Hillary Clinton. Substantial majorities told pollsters they do not trust the prohibitive Democratic presidential nominee. But the worst numbers, the one that is surely prompting bouts of hushed panic among Democratic operatives, were the responses generated when voters were asked if Clinton “cares about the needs and problems of people like you.” Among swing-state voters in Iowa, Virginia, and Colorado, solid majorities believed that Clinton did not care about them. By contrast, the 2012 exit polls revealed that Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama on every issue with the exception of the intangible matter of caring more about the little guy. Obama beat Romney on that issue by an astounding 63-point margin, and he rode that perceived empathy all the way into another four-year term in the White House.

Hillary Clinton has been a prominent figure in American politics for a quarter-century. She is already, perhaps unalterably, defined in the minds of voters. The Republican candidates, meanwhile, are not. Cook Political Report’s Amy Walter observed that Clinton and her fellow Democrats would do all within their power over the course of the nearly yearlong presidential campaign to define the nominee in negative terms. The natural headwinds confronting Democrats in their effort to secure a third consecutive term in the White House will ensure that the process of “defining” the GOP nominee is a pitiless one. But those natural headwinds are compounded by the fact that Hillary Clinton is not the political talent that Obama was.

 

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/07/22/hillary-clinton-2016-scorched-earth/