She’s here on her book tour. I have to say that I was a reluctant attendee. My wife bought tickets some time ago, but I was foot-dragging yesterday. My image of Hillary was from the campaign trail, and while her message was always good, her campaign persona put me off.
Well, let me tell you that she is a completely different person these days without the stress of the stump. I almost didn’t recognize her, as she looks relaxed and healthy.
The usual idiots were outside of the venue, including Antifa and the Liberty Prayer morons with signs along the lines of “Build a wall” and “30,000 emails!!!”. :rolleyes: But they largely behaved themselves, other than to stick cameras in people’s faces and ask belligerent questions. But then there was a large police presence to discourage confrontation.
The place was sold out, nearly 3000 seats. When she walked onto the stage, the noise from the largely female crowd was literally deafening. My hearing is already damaged, and I had to cover them to avoid three days of ringing from the din.
Hillary talked about Trump, of course, but it wasn’t a rant. She was reasonable and logical and funny, but took him to task about his casual approach to the job. She was also very strong in her support of women in politics and business, and of course children’s health care. And she was very frank about what happened (the title of her book) in the last election, without whining or pointing fingers. I thought she was very personable and humble, reminding me of the Hillary I met back in 1997. I think she still has a positive role to play in social advocacy and perhaps in political support for candidates.
Hopefully the pendulum settles back in the middle. She’s not the saint some people made her out to be during the election, and she’s not the cause of every failure of the Democratic Party. I agree she can fill a positive role in the next few years.
I am telling you she is very personable. Her laugh is quite contagious. I have met her, but so has nearly everyone in Arkansas. I liked her alot. And she is very smart.
The wife of a friend accosted her about a kindergarten while Bill was jogging and she bicycling near the Governor’s mansion. She was championing something about child care at the time.
Hillary Clinton is a good organizer, a decent strategist (with the exception of her presidential campaigns), and an excellent fundraiser for the Democrat party. Unfortunately, she feels that she is utterly entitled to be elected as president despite the fact that even if she could overcome public sentiment and malaise about her image and win she would be beleaguered by criticism and scandals which are largely exaggerated if not completely manufactured out of whole cloth, but would still impact her ability to lead. She is not the cause of the failings of the Democratic party to lose its dominance in American national politics which has much more to do with the shift in demographic focus of the party overall and its failures to appeal to and represent both growing progressives and disaffected industrial workers, but they fact that the DNCC rallied around Clinton rather than boosting a more viable candidate is a symptom of the detachment that has led the Democrats to such a decline.
The best thing Clinton could do going forward is throw her political and financial support behind viable candidates, and stay out of the limelight to prevent transfer of the (again, largely fraudulent but still widely associated) scandal to said candidates. Unfortunately, I fear that she is too much of a narcissist to step back and be content being the organizer, and that she’ll even try to push to run again for president in 2020 if she can muster enough support.
I am glad to hear positive things about meeting her in person. I had heard that in person she is a bit of a prick (I said that nicely ) while Bill is the friendly good ol boy persona and a lot more fun to be around on a daily basis. Both are very very smart-they kind of skew the curve for other Presidents and national leaders.
And I agree with Stranger-it would be great for the country if she would stay out of the limelight and support a centralist progressive who can win elections.
What the Democratic Party needs to do to become viable nationwide again is slowly coming into focus. It isn’t there yet in my mind and is mostly being driven by seeing in the Republican Party what not to do and what to do, but the outlines are there.
When I met her back in their Arkansas days she wasn’t running for office. Pres. Clinton was personality plus. She couldn’t outshine him, if she tried. She made a tour of schools one year, giving a little talk and taking questions. She was forthright and friendly and surprisingly funny. I pinned a corsage on her the night she came to a school my child was at. I don’t mean to gush, but she was just really nice. They came to this area alot campaigning. His Mother lived in the town I am close to. Everyone around here met or at least saw the Clintons during those years.
I could see her really being a big help to the DNC if she wanted. I wouldn’t if I were her. She will field questions about Trump for the rest of her life, I bet. That would get old real quick.
Her talk was largely aimed at encouraging women to be more engaged in politics, to run for office, and to stand up for themselves. I think it’s unlikely that she’ll run again and will settle for having cracked the glass ceiling as the first woman ever nominated. She also seems completely gaga over her grandkids and wants to be around for them. I think another presidential run would likely kill her.
Hillary Clinton wasn’t really the problem; it was Clinton, Inc. that people didn’t like and could never warm up to. Bill had just enough Arkansas in him to bullshit people into believing that he hadn’t gone corporate. Urbane Hillary Clinton had a harder time pulling that off. Even so, I still think the country has been a sucker for conspiracy theories ever since Oliver Stone came out with his JFK bullshit, and the right wing has been spinning conspiracy theories about the Clintons since then. They had always found a way to survive the onslaught, but in the day and age of social media, conspiracy theories become reality. And the tapestry of lies woven about Hillary finally became America’s “reality” too. The right wing believed that the Clintons murdered Vince Foster, Seth Rich, and the Bengazi Four; the left believe she kept Bernie Sanders out of the Democratic party and stole the election from someone who wasn’t really a democrat…and still isn’t.
I thought she looked better, healthier. During the campaign I though she looked very pasty and exhausted (and most likely was). She looks her age, which is the same as mine, but I was too far away and am saying that based on the image on the large projection screen.
And that’s the difference. She was “allowed” to speak because she is part of the Left. Sure there were some protesters outside, but her speech was allowed to be heard.
Had the venue featured a speaker with “wrong” views. Ideas that the Left disagreed with. The speech would have been shut down by rioters who couldn’t bare to allow people to even hear views seen as coming from the Right. Sure some speakers from the Right manage to be heard with enough police presence, but there is almost always violence outside against these speakers and the people who come to hear them. How much violence is usually seen outside an event when someone from the Left speaks?
Yes, there have been a few instances in the past year where right-wing speakers at some of America’s most liberal colleges have been shouted down.
But saying that would be true for conservative speakers anywhere and everywhere needs some supporting evidence. (Not to mention, those speakers would have no trouble getting time on Fox News.)
It’s more like witnessing against an imagined persecution. Even as the conservative wing of the Republican party has taken over the legislative and executive branches of the federal government and is busy trying to pack federal judgeships with conservative-minded (and more frequently rated as “unqualified” by the American Bar Association) appointees, hard-core conservatives are still whinging about how unfair it is that they aren’t allowed to voice their opinions and that they’re being repressed, somehow.
And of course, it was those darn counterprotestors who were the cause of all of the violence in the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville in August. If not for them, it would have been a peaceable assembly of Kluxers, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, and other “very fine people” quietly protesting the removal of an icon of the human slavery side of a destructive war that devastated the country over a hundred and fifty years ago. It was “The Left” which prompted some sociopathic asshole to drive his car into a crowd of counterprotesters.
There is no debate here. Just pissing and moaning by sorry winners who are upset that they now have to bear responsibility for governing the nation rather than just blaming it all on Obama. They’d actually have been more happy if Hillary had won and they could keep screaching paranoid conspiracy theories.
) while Bill is the friendly good ol boy persona and a lot more fun to be around on a daily basis. Both are very very smart-they kind of skew the curve for other Presidents and national leaders.