RUTHFULLY YOURS

While her lapdogs in the news media claim Hillary Clinton has changed her negative attitudes about the military and law enforcement, she has once again pandered to minority voters by attacking American police officers by comparing them with ISIS terrorists, according to officials with the National Association of Chiefs of Police. (See videos below.)

The Democrat’s presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton participated in a Townhall event on Monday for Univision’s afilliated network Fusion where she answered questions about white privilege and terrorism. Hillary Clinton said “white terrorism” and “police violence” are just as big a threat today to blacks and Latinos as are the Islamist terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Question: “The danger of ISIS is clearly a major threat to American safety, but personally, I know many minorities who are much more concerned with racist attacks at the local level than radical Islamists, so just — question to put it plainly since often, issues of race are tiptoed, do you believe that white terrorism and extremism is as much a threat to some in this country as something like ISIS?”

Clinton’s Answer: “Yes, I believe there are all kinds of underground movements and efforts in our country that try to use violence or assert beliefs that I find often lead to violence,” Clinton said before outright accusing some police officers of being terrorists. I think that when you have police violence that terrorized communities, that doesn’t show the respect that you’re supposed to have from respecting people in your authority, that can feel, also, terrorizing.”

During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney gained a reputation as a man who was too nice to hit Barack Obama hard. The most glaring instance of this reluctance came on September 12, 2012, when the news broke that Benghazi had come under attack. Romney refused to go to the jugular. Later, it was reported that the Romney camp spiked an ad by the RNC attacking Obama on the events of that night. Anything Romney had to say about Obama’s incompetence (or even whereabouts that night) in a debate was effectively neutered. Candy Crowley’s interjection during the second presidential debate was simply the cherry on top.

Romney was too relaxed a candidate to get in the dirt and get bloody. His campaign’s preference for focusing on his policies and personal principles may have been noble, but his refusal to fight rough with Obama left voters with the impression that he was weak.

That impression was reinforced by Romney’s refusal to defend himself against Obama’s attacks. His campaign never really countered Team Chicago’s claim that he had given a woman cancer, nor did it effectively argue against the suggestion that as president he would delight in executing Big Bird live on PBS.

The Obama campaign was unrelenting against Romney. And in all likelihood, Clinton’s campaign against the GOP nominee will be just as ruthless. If Republicans do not learn to counter Democratic criticism — and hard — 2016 may yield the same result as did 2012 and 2008.

At present, there is little indication that the current crop of Republicans has learned the lesson of the past two elections. At last weekend’s Kemp Forum in Columbia, S.C., several GOP candidates were asked about former president Bill Clinton’s past behavior — specifically, about allegations of sexual assault. Alarmingly, their answers were uniformly weak.

As we near the end of the pre-season in this election cycle, voters in the early states are starting to look closely at the candidates for the first time. Over the past few days, I’ve tried to get a sense of what those who are really paying attention are hearing the candidates say. As far as possible, I’ve aimed to avoid the filters through which we political junkies have been following the race for months. So I have spent some time listening to the stump speeches that the major candidates have been delivering in the last couple of weeks in the early states. C-SPAN makes it easy. Most voters don’t attend campaign events and hear complete speeches from the contenders, but in the earliest primary states they can – and do. And these speeches are in any case a good indication of how candidates understand themselves and their message at this stage.

The most striking thing that emerges from listening to these speeches one after another is that the theme of this election year so far for Republicans is the question of the establishment and the public. That’s not surprising. But how candidates are taking up the question did surprise me. The natural way to think about the subject — a kind of generic populist template — is that our governing elite in general and the Republican establishment in particular are awfully strong and are oppressing the public in some way. But that’s not really how most Republican contenders are talking about the issue. More often, at least implicitly, their subject is not the strength but the weakness of the establishment, even if they don’t quite put it that way. All of them describe the hollowing out and decay of America’s elite, its core institutions, and its political leadership. And some of the key differences between the candidates become a little clearer when we see them as differences in how they would approach that serious problem.