JAMES TARANTO: THE NEW AND IMPROVED HILLARY CLINTON RUNS INTO SOME DIFFICULTIES
http://online.wsj.com/articles/best-of-the-web-today-new-and-improved-1403121893
A participant in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll provides this amusing quote, which appears in today’s Journal story about the results: “Anita Windley, 30, who voted for [Barack] Obama in 2008 and again in 2012, doesn’t think he’s doing enough to help people in her New York City neighborhood. She complains that jobs are still hard to find and the local schools are subpar. ‘It’s time for somebody new,’ she said, ‘like Hillary.’ ”
That would be Hillary Clinton, who if she wins the presidential nomination in 2016 will be the oldest Democrat ever to do so. Lewis Cass, 66 when he lost the presidency to Whig Zachary Taylor, has held the record since 1848, 99 years before Mrs. Clinton’s birth.
Although she hasn’t even declared whether she’s a candidate, there’s a common view that Mrs. Clinton’s nomination and election are inevitable. If you’re convinced that is true, you can put money on it: According to OddsChecker.com, London bookmakers are offering slightly better than even odds on her victory in November 2016. Before risking your life savings, consider that you’re betting on three contingencies. For the bet to pay off, she has to run and win the nomination and win the election.
Mrs. Clinton is by far the favorite. No bookie is offering less than 7-to-1 odds on any other prospective candidate. That’s because, with no one else having declared a candidacy either, the Republican field is wide open, as is the field of prospective Democratic challengers to Mrs. Clinton or alternatives should she decide not to run.
The WSJ/NBC poll found Mrs. Clinton “remains the undisputed favorite for the Democratic nomination, drawing positive reviews from four out of five Democrats,” writes the Journal’s Patrick O’Connor. “But her prospects in a general election look a little less secure.” In a WSJ.com blog post, Reid Epstein elaborates:
Americans think Hillary Clinton is capable of being president, but they’re still not sure whether to trust her.
The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found 55% of all voters think Mrs. Clinton is “knowledgeable and experienced enough to handle the presidency,” but more voters disagree than agree with the statement that she is “honest and straightforward.” . . .
Today, 38% of voters say she is “honest and straightforward,” compared with 40% who say she isn’t. That figure is better for Mrs. Clinton than in March 2008, during the Democratic primaries, when 33% said she was honest and 43% said she wasn’t. . . .
Of course, in March 2008 Mrs. Clinton had was involved in a bitter campaign for the nomination, having proved a couple of months earlier to be evitable after all. NBC, meanwhile, notes this polarized result:
Asked how likely they would be to vote for the former secretary of state if she makes a White House run in 2016, 38 percent of registered voters told pollsters that they would “probably” or be “almost certain to” vote for her, while a similar 37 percent said they’d definitely oppose her.
“Of course, pretty much everybody with an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ after his or her name is polarizing these days,” observes PowerLineBlog’s John Hinderaker. Yet while it’s hardly surprising that 37% would definitely oppose her, it seems premature to declare her inevitable if only 38% are ready even to say they’d probably support her.
Mrs. Clinton has, of course, been very much in the public eye in recent days, as she’s been on a book tour that is understood to be a preliminary presidential campaign. If the question is whether she is “honest and straightforward,” there are signs she is answering in the negative.
Fox News reports that in an interview last night with the network’s Bret Baier and Greta Van Susteren, Mrs. Clinton “suggested . . . that she had doubts from the outset about whether the Benghazi terror attack was triggered by a protest over an anti-Islam film–though her State Department pushed that narrative for days”:
“This was the fog of war,” [Mrs.] Clinton said, when asked about the administration’s controversial public explanation of the attack.
“My own assessment careened from the video had something to do with it, the video had nothing to do with it–it may have affected some people, it didn’t affect other people,” she said in the interview. . . .
[Mrs.] Clinton added: “There’s no doubt terrorists were involved.”
The “fog of war” comment is especially rich, given that the entire thrust of the Obama administration’s explanation for the attack was to deny that it had anything to do with war.
And suspicions of Mrs. Clinton are not limited to the right, as National Journal’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports:
Hillary Clinton may have finally recanted on her 2002 Senate vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq, but in the eyes of the die-hard antiwar activists who gathered Monday evening in front of the White House to protest another potential military conflict with the country, the former secretary of State can never apologize enough.
“We’re not going to forgive her, despite her best effort to whitewash her history,” said Brian Becker, the executive director of the antiwar ANSWER Coalition, which formed in the run-up to the Iraq War. “We consider Hillary Clinton to be almost a part of the neoconservative establishment.”
To be sure, ANSWER is a fringe group that does not necessarily reflect mainstream Democratic thinking. On the other hand, the Democratic electorate in 2008 and even 2004 proved to be more fervently antiwar than one might have predicted given the voting patterns of the party’s congressmen in 2001 and 2002. Expect there will be a challenge from the left if Mrs. Clinton seeks the nomination, and don’t rule out the possibility that it will prove a strong one.
And why did it take her so long to renounce her vote? TalkingPointsMemo’s Dylan Scott has her answer, from a Monday appearance in Toronto:
“I had this sense that I had voted for it, and we had all these young men and women over there, and it was a terrible battle environment,” Clinton said. “I knew some of the young people who were there and I was very close to one Marine lieutenant who lead [sic] a mixed platoon of Americans and Iraqis in the first battle for Fallujah.”
“So I felt like I couldn’t break faith with them,” she continued. “Maybe that doesn’t make sense to anybody else but me, but that’s how I felt about it. So I kept temporizing and I kept avoiding saying it because I didn’t want there to be any feeling that I was backing off or undercutting my support for this very difficult mission in Iraq.”
She said on Monday that her apparent hesitation to recant the vote was not a political calculation. . . .
“Well, in fact, in the Democratic Party at that time, the smart political decision, as so many of my colleagues did, was to come out and say ‘Terrible mistake, shouldn’t have done it,’ and you know blame the Bush administration,” she said.
This may be an honest accounting of her thinking on the subject, but it isn’t very straightforward, is it? She seems to be acknowledging that she privately changed her mind about Iraq long ago and dishonestly concealed her new view. Her defense is that it was a white lie and did not benefit her politically. Now, at long last, she is prepared to reveal her real position–which happens to be, even more clearly than it was in 2008, the only politically expedient position for a Democratic presidential candidate to take.
National Journal’s Ron Fournier notices something we also did about the Fox interview: Asked about the Internal Revenue Service scandal, she was maddeningly equivocal:
After nearly 30 years of covering Bill and Hillary Clinton, I should have known her words needed parsing.
“I think that anytime that the IRS is involved, for many people, it’s a real scandal.” This was the first thing Clinton said after Greta Van Susteren asked whether she thought it was a phony scandal. . . .
The key to the sentence is “for many people.” Clinton did not say whether she’s one of those people. With a soft chuckle, she delivered a line that simultaneously empathized with Obama’s critics while giving herself a safe distance from them. I never said I think the scandal is real.
It was vintage Clinton. You could almost see her husband standing in the studio’s shadows, biting his lower lip and nodding.
Van Susteren asked Mrs. Clinton if she agreed with what Fournier rightly calls “Obama’s indefensible . . claim that the scandal is phony.” Her answer: “I don’t have the details, but I think what President Obama means there is [that] there really wasn’t a lot of evidence that this was deliberate, but that’s why the investigation needs to continue.”
That is not even a remotely plausible interpretation of Obama’s words. “The public is left with a mound of words to parse,” Fournier writes–a fancy way of saying Mrs. Clinton isn’t honest and trustworthy.
On the other hand, National Review’s Molly Wharton notes this exchange, from a CNN appearance:
“We cannot let a minority of people–and that’s what it is, a minority of people–hold a viewpoint that terrorizes the majority of people,” Hillary Clinton said on Tuesday when asked about the gun-control debate.
She noted that she was disappointed when Congress did not pass universal background checks, and told the questioner she thought an assault-weapons ban and limits on magazine sizes would be [of] help.
Mrs. Clinton’s remark about the pro-gun “viewpoint” sounds like an attack on the First Amendment, not just the Second. And she doesn’t know much about the subject of guns; if you watch the video, you’ll see she complains twice about “automatic weapons,” which are already almost totally banned and are hardly ever used in crimes.
But even Barack Obama kept quiet about his antigun agenda until after he’d been re-elected. So maybe Mrs. Clinton deserves some credit for candor here.
Comments are closed.
