Hillary Clinton Will Keep Dodging the Press — and Win the Election Anyway
Posted: Wed Jul 08, 2015 6:29 pm
[quote=http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/20 ... nyway.html]Clinton’s interview on CNN, her first major national sit-down with a journalist since she officially announced her candidacy three months ago, was essentially content-free — but at 19 minutes, easier to take than the similarly anodyne 656 pages of Hard Choices, the memoir that served as her campaign’s soft launch. Yet there were two revealing points along the way. The first was that her claim that her subpar numbers for trustworthiness in recent polls could be attributed to her political antagonists — a “barrage of attacks that are largely fomented by and coming from the right.” That is false. The largest wellspring of mistrust in Hillary Clinton is being generated by such non-right-wing news organizations as the Washington Post and the Times, which have done major journalistic investigations into the financial murk of the Clinton Foundation and will continue to do so. (The Clinton team also blamed the right for vilifying the July 4 rope incident, but again it was the mainstream press that most strenuously called attention to it.) The public’s mistrust of Clinton is further compounded by her failure to answer questions about any controversy in a timely and convincing manner, an evasiveness that surfaced yet again when she batted away foundation questions on CNN.
The other interesting aspect of the interview was Clinton’s embrace of Donald Trump as a target, seizing on his bigoted rant about Mexicans and tying it to the entire GOP, including the Establishment figure of Jeb Bush. As I and others have been writing for weeks, Trump is not a joke, even if he plays one on television, but a real threat to Republican chances in 2016. The potential of his off-the-wall diatribes to inflict major damage on the party’s brand at the first Fox News debate, now less than a month away, is real. And increasingly conservative commentators are saying so in ever more panicky terms — George Will, Peter Wehner, Jonah Goldberg. But the fact remains that Hillary is correct: Trump does represent a major strain in his party. His enablers include not just the old Sarah Palin base, but major, non-fringe figures. Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, William Kristol, Rudy Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, and National Review’s Rich Lowry have all defended Trump to various degrees. Others are cowering and saying nothing, much as they did in the Confederate-flag debate immediately after the Charleston massacre. It took Jeb Bush more than two weeks to disown Trump’s incendiary sentiments about Mexicans.
Which is to say, Hillary Clinton can dodge the press as much as she wants as long as this is the opposing field. No Republican is going to win the presidency if a mobilized American Hispanic population turns up to vote for a Democratic ticket in the same lopsided numbers that African-American voters do.[/quote]
The other interesting aspect of the interview was Clinton’s embrace of Donald Trump as a target, seizing on his bigoted rant about Mexicans and tying it to the entire GOP, including the Establishment figure of Jeb Bush. As I and others have been writing for weeks, Trump is not a joke, even if he plays one on television, but a real threat to Republican chances in 2016. The potential of his off-the-wall diatribes to inflict major damage on the party’s brand at the first Fox News debate, now less than a month away, is real. And increasingly conservative commentators are saying so in ever more panicky terms — George Will, Peter Wehner, Jonah Goldberg. But the fact remains that Hillary is correct: Trump does represent a major strain in his party. His enablers include not just the old Sarah Palin base, but major, non-fringe figures. Chris Christie, Ted Cruz, William Kristol, Rudy Giuliani, Rush Limbaugh, and National Review’s Rich Lowry have all defended Trump to various degrees. Others are cowering and saying nothing, much as they did in the Confederate-flag debate immediately after the Charleston massacre. It took Jeb Bush more than two weeks to disown Trump’s incendiary sentiments about Mexicans.
Which is to say, Hillary Clinton can dodge the press as much as she wants as long as this is the opposing field. No Republican is going to win the presidency if a mobilized American Hispanic population turns up to vote for a Democratic ticket in the same lopsided numbers that African-American voters do.[/quote]