Yeah, I wouldn’t want any ACORN-style problems to keep a pro-Hillary voter registration drive from yielding big dividends for Dems up and down the ticket.
I think Indiana could definitely go for Hillary if Trump continues to melt down. Obama carried the state, narrowly, in 2008.
(I’m a Hillary supporter)
Anyone want to weigh in on your thoughts on the “Pants on Fire” rating given to Hillary’s “Cromer said I was being truthful…” thing?
My guess is, she skates. A little bad press for going full-on “It depends on the definition of the word ‘is’ is” but I figure she’ll shrug this one off.
It’s keeping the email in the news. Her advisors have got to be telling her that she doesn’t need to lie about this anymore.
Agree with adaher: it keeps the emails in the news and it keeps her negatives constant. Trump probably permanently turned off about 2-4 percent of his potential voting bloc this past week. She now has a golden opportunity to pull away from Trump, but I fear she’s blowing it. She can’t just hope that Trump keeps tripping all over himself – he might indeed self-destruct, but I wouldn’t count on that as a strategy. He has come back before. He can do it again and he’s got more than enough time.
Here’s the thing: even if Hillary doesn’t have people voting for her, if swing voters look at her continued lying and say “Screw this, I’m not voting for anyone” or “Screw this I’m voting for some no-name, write-in candidate” she still basically loses voters. That’s why she has to start being a little more streamlined in her interviews. She’s actually okay on the campaign trail. She doesn’t dazzle but she’s okay. But these interviews are just terrible. She’s got to perform better.
Absolutely agree. Perhaps she could give a single, scrupulously-fact-checked, no-wiggle-room statement on the email controversy, and then always say, “I have nothing to add to that” if she’s asked about it again. Best she otherwise puts it behind her.
Yes; it’s unfair that Trump can lie big and lie often and pay no price, while Clinton is held to a higher standard. Unfair, but: that’s the reality.
She has to be more careful. If she starts a sentence with “Comey said,” then what follows has to be a word-for-word quote, with not one comma out of place. She can’t just give what she believes to be the essence of what he said or the intrinsic meaning of what he said or anything of that nature. If she says “____ said” then she can’t go on with anything except an exact quotation.
It isn’t up to *her *when, or if, it gets put behind her. There are still people thinking she killed Vince Foster, for pity’s sake.
I’ve seen a couple of Hillary Clinton ads during the Olympics. I live in California. She must have money to burn.
Meanwhile the Olympics are packaged like a Democratic messaging commercial. Especially the commercials for various companies all highlighting the strength in American diversity and grit. It’s an optimistic theme.
I had thought the easing off of the media might help Trump regroup but instead it helps reinforce the “stronger together” positive messaging of Team Clinton.
With both candidates, their most grievous sins are hiding their less awful sins, which are still considerable. Trump is a liar, yes. But his bigotry, his instability, are the bigger issues with him. Clinton’s lying is actually her biggest problem, but she’s also been enough of a flip flopper to make Mitt Romney look like an icon of consistency. But the attention span of the media and voters is limited, so we only focus on the worst aspects of the candidates.
The reason Trump can get away with some lies is because his supporters are knuckle-dragging morons who don’t care. Is that what you want from your candidate, to get away with lies?
And really, if one supports Clinton you don’t want her to skate on lies because she’ll continue to do it. Her long-time supporters need to kick up a fuss because she won’t listen to anybody else. She’ll blame it all on the vast right-wing conspiracy.
It doesn’t matter what supporters think. George McGovern and Barry Goldwater’s supporters thought they could do no wrong. Didn’t help them. It’s what the persuadables think that matters.
No, I’m not saying that I wish Clinton could get away with lying; I’m just saying that I can sympathize with her probable frustration at seeing Trump get away with it, while her every utterance is picked apart.
But, frustrated or not, she needs to be more careful. She can’t give lawyerly answers; not only will that remind people of Bill’s *“what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” *incident, but lawyerly answers feed into the ‘can’t trust what she says’ label she’s been saddled with. People on the right will seize on such utterances with glee, and people on the left will be troubled.
(Not troubled enough to vote for Trump…but, still. It’s annoying to see her undercut herself that way.)
I don’t disagree entirely. My reading is that Clinton feels aggrieved that so much hay has been made of what actually is rather unimpressive: three out of over 30,000 emails that had no “classified” headers, but instead had a little (c) somewhere in their bodies. My guess is that she didn’t see or notice or remember those 3-out-of-30,000, so that when she said ‘I didn’t send or receive classified emails’ she believed she was telling the truth.
And so when she keeps clinging to that, and in the process trying to support her view by fudging what Comey said, she feels she’s NOT lying. She feels (I would guess) that the accusations of Treason!!! (or, at best, Irresponsibility!!!) are completely unfair in the circumstances. She genuinely believes that the essence of what happened with her server is that she behaved responsibly. So she keeps repeating that she didn’t send or receive classified emails----despite the fact that technically, she did.
So she needs to say something like “out of over 30,000 emails, three had little (c)-markings in their bodies but no “Classified” headers, and I failed to notice the (c) mark inside the bodies of those three emails that had no “Classified” headers. Failing to notice those (c) marks was a mistake on my part. I apologize for that mistake and can assure the American people that I will never again miss a “(c)” in any document.”
There’s no doubt at all that this would not be as satisfying as saying
…but them’s the breaks.
The great irony over the last few weeks is that Tim Kaine does a better job of answering her email questions than Hillary does. He acknowledges the ‘mistakes’ Clinton has made but doesn’t allow the reporter to frame his answers. He answers how he wants.
All she really needs to say is “As the FBI director and I have both said, I could have done a better job of handling those emails and the server. But I cooperated with the investigation and they agreed no there were no laws broken. I’ve addressed it numerous times. I’ve got nothing more to add.”
Hillary gets trapped into thinking she has to answer questions with precision – that’s the lawyer in her. She needs to find a graceful way to say “With all due respect, I’ve answered that question before, and I’m more interested questions I haven’t answered. I think your viewers are too.”
The good news for Hillary going forward is that while Trump may still have a rabid fanbase and he might have time to recover, it’s really beginning to look like he may have done irreparable damage to his relationships within the party. I have nothing more than a hunch, but that’s my take reading between the lines of various interviews and the defections and loud silence from multiple party members over the past 10 days. And that’s actually a pretty significant development - because if he can’t get the party to put energy into supporting him, then he has to do the heavy lifting himself. Added to that is his problem of geography. Trump’s outburst increased the number of swing states in which he is dangling over the cliff. Successful campaigns start out by locking down certain states and putting energy and efforts into winning a handful of remaining tossups. Unfortunately, Trump will probably have to focus on more than just the rust belt. He may have to devote money and energy to Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina, and Iowa. He shouldn’t have to worry about these states, just like he shouldn’t have to worry about New Hampshire.
Lawyers are notorious for *not *answering questions with precision.
Now that it is blatantly obvious how easy Trump is to rile up and that he is incapable of not lashing out I don’t think the Hillary campaign is doing a good enough job of taking advantage of this. There should be a non stop barrage of surrogates out there hitting him on everything from his wealth to his Russian ties.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that when the Olympics are over.
I’ve seen Hillary ads during the Olympics. The one I remember is this one -
It's an old clip of Letterman busting on The Donald for making his clothes in China and Bangladesh, while Trump just sits there and shrugs with a goofy look on his on his face.I understand what you’re saying but the only people who should be frustrated are Clinton supporters; why does she keep putting herself in these situations? We should be holding all politicians to the fire.
I think Clinton will likely be an able president but she appears to have this attitude that rules are for the little people. I hope she doesn’t take a big step over the line.
Flip-flopping for real is a virtue, not a vice. It either means that with new information or new ideas, the candidate is able to change her mind; or it means that, as the candidate realizes what the country wants in a president, the candidate is willing to change her mission in order to best meet the country’s needs.
Flip-flopping like Romney’s etch-a-sketch manager’s comment is bad, because it suggests a candidate has no intention of following through on a commitment. I see no sign that Clinton flipflops in this way.