Chronos -
Again: she is not being investigated. The process by which the state department handles the emails she has handed over is being investigated. The possibility that some information was sent to the account that the Intelligence IG believes should have been categorized as classified and was not is being investigated … again, as a routine matter.
These are very significant differences.
…to shield himself from transparency. Seriously, the agency that he defunded was the public watchdog that was tasked with making sure the government wasn’t misbehaving. The drunk in charge of the agency had nothing to do with his reasons for his actions, except as a very weak pretext, and even if that had been his reason, it would have been a very bad reason, because the agency itself wasn’t drunk, just one person.
EDIT: Right, DSeid, apologies for glossing over that distinction, which just makes the contrast even stronger.
And she resigned and the agency is now funded. He’s not being charged with defunding an agency. He’s being charged with coercing a criminal to resign her post. Someone who herself abused her power pretty blatantly in the process of trying to avoid arrest.
Aaaand the New York Times apologizes for having fucked up so badly.
Admittedly a pretty weak mea culpa:
But the tone is still one of these sorts of fuck-ups are just unavoidable … and they are not. She (Margaret Sullivan, the Public Editor) let’s the staff off way too easy. This false story was run with, despite anonymous sources and no review of the document itself, and backed down without official corrections and without any transparency, because the staff is eager to find anything that can bring down the apparent frontrunner, Clinton. Hence credulity became the word of the day.
She is correct that
Hard to believe that they have really learned much when the defense remains (apparently) that they asked the same unnamed source several times and since (s)he kept saying the same thing they felt it had to be true! Or true enough anyway. We are competing with internet “news” now afterall!
Cracking negative 24 among independents.
Yes those are some really worrying numbers. The NBC/Marist poll backs up the Quinnipiac one: her favorability is 37-56 in Iowa and 37-57 in New Hampshire, around 7-8 points worse than her national numbers which are not that great either.
Can we put the confusion to rest at some point?
Independents ≠ swing voters.
A majority of the “independents” are GOP leaners who think that the GOP is not conservative enough to deserve their party ID. Some are Democratic leaners who feel the party is not liberal enough.
That she is not doing much worse in that cohort is what is shocking.
A majority of independents are not GOP leaners:
Independents split about evenly between Dem and Rep leaners. It’s true that they aren’t classic “swing voters”, but they aren’t just Republicans. If they were, Democrats would never win, becuase only 28% of voters are Democrats.
Chris Cilizza used the word “collapsing”. Is that the same as free fall, or is there a subtle difference I’m not aware of?
Will her collapse eventually be down to the levels of the Republicans’ peaks, d’ya think?
She’s already below some Republicans.
Wow! Chris Cilizza said that! Man, if I had known that, my first thought would have been “Who the hell is Chris Cilizza, and why should I give a rat’s?”!
Let’s first focus on our agreement: they are not the swing voters. They are often partisan, often more partisan than those who have a stated party ID. Those who are not are often those who don’t vote.
The issue is well addressed in this Cook Political Report.
Now it is of course true that not all of the rise of so-called independents consists of those who will always be loyal to the GOP when it comes time to vote. But the group “independent” now consists much more of those who had called themselves “GOP” than in years past. They are NOT moderates and not the same as swing voters…
It is potentially an interesting redux … possibly ending up a Bush and a Clinton going into the general season both under water, the Bush a bit more so than the Clinton but the Clinton viewed as not honest by a majority. All we need now is a Perot. (And Trump need not apply.)
I just don’t think it’s going to be Bush vs. Clinton. Precisely because of their unfavorables, neither is guaranteed the nomination. I doubt both will win theirs. Perhaps neither.
Remember though that unfavorables and favorables are like running from the bear … I don’t have to be loved by everyone, just preferred a bit more than the other chump(s) running.
As even the WaPo article comes round to noting
Again the depth of unpopularity that Clinton and Bush each had going into the general election season was even more dramatic; Clinton did not take off until Perot (who had stripped Bush of many of those who were reluctantly saying they would vote for him) quit right as Clinton was giving an amazing acceptance speech that was aimed directly at those voters.
Also, how bad are the major news sources going to get? This isn’t the magnitude of error that NYT was guilty of but
(Color mine.)
Seriously? A major media outlet can’t catch series being used instead of serious? They cut back on copy editors?
There’s primaries to get through first though, which is why candidates with high unfavorables usually don’t even get to the general election.
Yes, such races draw third party challenges. But it’s important to remember that Clinton was a relative unknown nationally, and until the convention pretty much all most voters knew about him was that he was a philanderer. The first time I saw a picture of BIll Clinton was on Time Magazine’s cover and it said, “Can America Trust Bill Clinton?” Even liberals weren’t sure about him because he was the leader of a faction that wanted the party to move more to the center. If the Democrats hadn’t lost three straight elections Clinton would never even have been considered, as demonstrated by the futility of more conservative Democrats running in primaries since Clinton(Evan Bayh, Bill Richardson, Bob Graham). But Clinton as it turned out had outstanding political talents, which meant that when America heard him he gained in popularity. His wife is well known and her political talent is not such that she can change minds.
The Fix is a blog. I’d guess a lot less effort goes into editing than in the print edition.
Hillary dodges a Keystone pipeline question: http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/07/28/hillary-clintons-ridiculous-hedge-on-keystone/
Yeah, that was pretty lame. It does suggest that she may hold a significantly different view than Obama, in which case she would want to avoid expressing it, but it wasn’t handled well.
Gowdy has had to resort to making shit up. Caught sooner than expected, that’s all.