Un-Presidential
Michael Goodwin at the New York Post looks at Hillary Clinton's campaign here in the dying days of the race for the nomination and says that the low road she has chosen has taken on a distinctly un-presidential quality.
No matter the office or the candidates, all campaigns usually arrive at a moment of clarity. The cotton-candy clouds of confusion part and we suddenly see that one person is connecting with voters and looks better suited for the job.
That moment is upon us in the Democratic race for President, and for backers of Hillary Clinton, it is not a pretty picture.
Although she is desperate for a big win, Clinton has frittered away almost three weeks in astonishingly trivial pursuits. It's as though her computer blew a fuse after Super Tuesday on Feb. 5 and she doesn't know what to do. Or who she wants to be.
Internal campaign feuds are becoming public, she is running low on cash and the message changes as often as Hillary's pantsuits.
One day the media is blamed for letting Obama off easily and the next day voters are accused of being fooled by his charisma. Bill Clinton is Mr. Everything one day and Mr. Invisible the next.
Most revealing is that Hillary herself now seems determined to aim low, a conclusion that was painfully obvious at Thursday's Texas debate. In a showdown she had to win, she bet the night on a cheap attack that Obama plagiarized some of his speeches and thus has a disqualifying character defect.
To say the logic is a stretch doesn't do it justice. No surprise then that Obama swatted the charge away, but she couldn't let go. "It's not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox," she said in a rehearsed line that will have no imitators at the Oscars.
It's hard to imagine a more un-presidential moment at such a critical time. It qualifies as a case of political malpractice that neither she nor her aides realized how petty the attack would sound.
It did sound petty, it made Clinton look small and weak. Goodwin seems a bit surprised at all this, but I have been pointing out for a very long time that Hillary Clinton suffers from a serious case of political tin ear and always has. She has had a knack for belting out statements that just plain sound bad - they grate on the ear of voters regardless of part affiliation.
That political tone-deafness is why she has almost no hope of catching Obama at this late date. Unless he stumbles, she's done.
By TKelso, Sunday, 24 February , 2008 @ 12:39 pm
Concur. Since coming on the national scene in ‘91 her behavior has always suggested that she viewed herself as the true power behind Bill’s throne; that while her bumpkin hubby may be personally popular, she was the brains of the operation and would therefore someday rightfully ascend the throne of Clintondom. In fact, she dramatically overestimated–and still overestimates–her contribution to Bill’s success. She has truly been just a supporting character for her wayward and impulsive (sexually and otherwise) spouse. She has served as a brake on the most self-destructive of his behaviors and has provided him with cover when he’s been unable to control those impulses. She then confuses her acts in support of Bill’s innate political gift with the gift itself, and in doing so mis-attributes much of his success to her. Interestingly, she seems to have learned nothing from her many political missteps over the last 30 odd years in public life. Fiddling with her surname from Clinton to Rodham to Rodham-Clinton back to Clinton served no purpose whatsoever; it only cast a negative aura around her which persists to this day. Her secret national healthcare project back in ‘93 was a political A-bomb. The missing Rose Law Firm billing records , Castle Grande, the list goes on and on. She hasn’t learned anything from these flops about how her actions are likely to be viewed. A tin ear can be overcome at the regional level (think of all the other senators and congressmen we make fun of on the national scene but whose constituents keep returning them to office–Kennedy, Thurmond, Byrd, Burton, Rangel). But a tin ear at the national level is simply not viable; you have to appease everyone in a national race, you can’t afford to discount major swaths of the national populace . From here on out, Hillary is going to revert to her primary coping response—ATTACK!