Bill Clinton in his two successful races for the White House in 1992 and 1996 won overwhelming majorities among Jewish voters, with margins not seen since the election of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in 1964 or of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to his third and fourth terms in 1940 and 1944. Since 1992, the Jewish vote has slowly become more competitive between the two major parties, approaching a 2/3 versus 1/3 split between Democrats and Republicans. The 2016 presidential race is likely to offer a choice between Hillary Clinton, who does not appear to have the same tight hold over Jewish voters that her husband did, and a Republican with far stronger pro-Israel credentials.
The early debates and campaigns for the nomination in both parties have been revealing for the issues that seem to matter to partisans on each side, and those that do not. With regard to United States relations with Israel, the topic has been almost entirely absent from discussion on the Democratic side. Democrats, and especially those on the Left who increasingly dominate the Democratic Party, are far less supportive of Israel or strong American-Israel ties than previous generations of Democratic presidents or leaders — such as Harry Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Hubert Humphrey, Bill Clinton and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Just as they did after the first Democrat debate, the Public Relations and Marketing Division of the Democrat Party––otherwise known as the mainstream media––fell all over themselves declaring Clinton’s victory over her Democrat rivals and the Republican Party. Ignored were the damning admissions that were revealed, particularly the irrefutable evidence that Clinton knew the Benghazi attack was planned by terrorists and not a spontaneous reaction to what Clinton called “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with,” the big lie spun by State and the White House to protect Obama’s campaign for reelection.
So now a full year from November 8, 2016 the Dems have all but anointed Hillary to be our next president, based on this despicable display of mendacity, hauteur, and uncontrolled giggling. If they are right, then this country will have turned a dangerous corner on the road to abandoning our republican heritage of limited government, federalism, and personal freedom.
It was inevitable that Bernie Sanders would be accused of sexism sooner or later.
His day came over the weekend. At the signature Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa, Hillary Clinton hit the Vermont senator for saying in the first Democratic debate that “all the shouting in the world” wouldn’t keep guns out of the wrong hands. According to Clinton, Sanders had directed a notoriously sexist insult at her — although not one of the 15 million people watching at the time had noticed it.
“I haven’t been shouting,” Clinton intoned, “but sometimes when a woman speaks out, some people think it’s shouting.” What Clinton’s plaint lacked in plausibility, it made up for in bad faith.
Shouting has not typically been considered a loaded term. Sanders didn’t say “screeching.” He didn’t say “nagging.” In fact, he had been saying that shouting is ineffectual in the gun debate long before he was entangled in an argument about gun control with Hillary Clinton.
So now Hillary Clinton is invincible.
Such is the new received wisdom. It replaces the old received wisdom that she was a fatally flawed candidate sowing despair among Democratic Party bigwigs.
The new wisdom comes after a good two weeks that began with Mrs. Clinton trouncing her rivals in the televised Democratic debate and ended with her besting her Republican inquisitors on the House Benghazi Committee. In between, Joe Biden announced he would not be making good on his dying son’s request to keep the White House from the Clintons after all.
For all this, the idea that Hillary is unstoppable is nuts. Not least because her victories are less about defeating opponents than making sure the serious ones are removed before the contest has begun.
Start with the money. Back in the spring we learned that Mrs. Clinton and her outside supporters were aiming to raise $2.5 billion for her campaign even as she decried the role of money in politics. To put that $2.5 billion in perspective, it’s more than Barack Obama and Mitt Romney spent combined in 2012.
There can be no doubt now: The U.S. economy is struggling, inequality is on the rise and too many Americans feel uncertain about their future.
On the campaign trail, I have met many of these men and women, who sit at the kitchen table each week, straining to stretch their dollars from shrinking paychecks. Families who can’t save for retirement with near-zero interest rates. Young parents who are being crushed by their student debt. Shop owners who can’t get a loan because their community bank went out of business.
We’ve had more than six years to watch the left’s prescriptions in action and the verdict is in: They don’t work. Under President Obama, the economy has been hobbled. The 73,000-page tax code is too complex to navigate without an army of accountants. The administration has added $7 trillion in new federal debt, and has doubled down on environmental regulations that crush business owners and farmers while raising energy prices.
Greenburgh, a town in Westchester, an area which has some of the fastest growing Jewish suburban communities in the country, is an unlikely place to find hate groups holding forth in its Town Hall auditorium. It’s certainly not the place where you expect a man linked to a shadowy terrorist bank to be promoting hatred against Jews and Israel with the acquiescence of the town supervisor.
And yet, bomb-sniffing dogs and metal detectors were the order of the day in the Greenburgh Town Hall as Jewish protesters gathered outside while inside opponents of Israel denounced the Jewish State.
The Jewish Rapid Response Coalition had come to stand up to hate, but found itself blocked and harassed while hate groups enjoyed the use of a taxpayer funded building. The event went ahead against the recommendation of Police Chief Chris McNerney. It went ahead even though its main speaker had defended terrorism and had authored an article titled, “Did Israel Really Think Hamas Would Turn the Other Cheek?”
She lied to the nation in 2012, and she’s lying again now. You don’t look surprised.
‘We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”
Those words, depraved words, were spoken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with President Obama by her side, on September 14, 2012. This was at Joint Base Andrews, during the most sacred of rites: the return of the remains of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, all slain in the line of duty in Benghazi.
And all slain, it must never be forgotten, by jihadists carrying out what Clinton, Obama, and high-ranking national-security officials throughout the United States government knew full well was a planned terrorist attack, not a “protest” run amok and incited by “an awful Internet video.”
That obvious fact is now explicit after Mrs. Clinton’s galling testimony on Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Benghazi massacre.
The American people continue to tell pollsters that they want a candidate to talk issues and substance rather than attack opponents.This is a load of crap. Americans may “want” that kind of campaign, but the kind of contest they respond to is the slash-and-burn, take-no-prisoners approach of candidates like Donald Trump.
Hillary Clinton’s recent rise in the polls has Senator Bernie Sanders playing catch-up. And many politicians believe that the best way to do that is not so much elevate your own numbers, but drag your opponents’ ratings down.
Sanders appears to have opened a new chapter in his campaign that employs a modified strategy of attacking Hillary Clinton’s record, and by extension, Clinton herself.
Bob Woodward: It better bother us that Hillary told conflicting stories on Benghazi By Thomas Lifson
Bob Woodward disagrees with Judy Woodruff of taxpayer funded PBS and most of the Democratic Party, and thinks that it matters when a secretary of state and prospective commander in chief says different things publicly and privately over a major terror attack.
Pam Key of Breitbart reports:
On this week’s “Fox News Sunday,” in discussing Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton’s testimony at the hearing of the House Select Committee on Benghazi last week, veteran journalist Bob Woodward said, “It better bother us” that Hillary Clinton different things publicly and privately.
Woodward said, “There are legitimate questions here … here’s the issue. you have inconsistencies. This is a tragedy, and it should be investigated.”
He added Clinton didn’t commit a crime and said, “People say one thing privately and saying something different publicly.” (snip)
Woodward said, “It better bother us. And this is the question we’re going to look at. And, you know, if she’s the nominee, she’s going to get a full field investigation by everyone. So will the Republicans. So we don’t get what we got with Nixon, which we didn’t know about, quite frankly. I mean, this was hidden. So I think there’s a big burden on journalists, on television and in the newspapers, bloggers. so when we get to election day next year, people can say, ‘you know what, I know or I had the chance to know everything possible about these people.’ And so, this hearing is one of the pieces of the puzzle.”
“If Jeb Bush’s campaign is struggling to stay afloat, he didn’t show it on Saturday,” CNN reports from Daniel Island, S.C. “A day after slashing salaries and cutting campaign staff, the former Florida governor got an enthusiastic reception and delivered one of his strongest campaign performances to date.”
Well, that’s one way of looking at it, but we have another. Consider the most widely discussed passage from his Daniel Island remarks:
Bush got one of his biggest responses from the crowd when he lamented the state of politics in Washington and argued that [Donald] Trump is not the kind of leader that could break through the gridlock.
“If this election is about how we’re going to fight to get nothing done, then . . . I don’t want any part of it. I don’t want to be elected president to sit around and see gridlock just become so dominant that people literally are in decline in their lives. That is not my motivation,” he said.
“I’ve got a lot of really cool things I could do other than sit around, being miserable, listening to people demonize me and me feeling compelled to demonize them. That is a joke. Elect Trump if you want that,” Bush added.
