I think many democrats also were annoyed by her. Al Gore was annoyed because she felt SHE was the real vice president. Tipper Gore couldn’t stand her. I’m not sure Michelle Obama thought much of her either.
And now we have the whole thing with the 2016 Hillary campaign taking over the DNC and taking away the parties money.
I really think most democrats wish the Clintons would do what the Bush’s did and just retire, go away, and allow new blood to come in.
Oh, and don’t expect Chelsea Clinton to be the new party favorite.
I’m guessing that Trump – for all his faults – never referred to that middle-aged and middle-class wife and mother as being deplorable to the point of being irredeemable. Did Hillary Clinton? If so, that might explain it.
Did she? :dubious: The GOP spin was to imply that she simply hated Good Red-Blooded Americans etc., certainly, but do *you *think that’s traceable to what she *actually *said?
I think she expressed regret, the very next day, about saying it. And when asked about it at the debate, because of course the moderator asked, I think she of course replied that “within hours I said I was sorry about the way I talked about that, because my argument is not with his supporters; it’s with him”.
But I think the real problem is, she played it coy instead of (a) standing by it and (b) specifying. The folks who shocked the OP with their language about her: do they think she was referring to them? Well – maybe. Are they right? Well, maybe.
As I said, that’s what I think. Out of curiosity: has anyone here read that book she wrote? Does she spend any time on that comment, and whether she meant A by it, and whether she gets why people thought she meant B, and whether she thinks she should’ve phrased it as C – or whether she should’ve not said it at all?
Apparently you’re not going to get people away from Mrs. Clinton to a broader issue. I tried (in post 39) but in vain. Apparently Mrs. Clinton arouses such strong emotions that she’s going to remain the topic.
However, I am also interested in the continuing “lowering of the acceptable level” not just of political discourse but of all topics of discourse. As for your acquaintances who spoke so crudely, I think maybe you should address it directly with them as to how you feel. People talk about rudeness as just “being honest” but it seems to me that it’s really less honest to just curse and move on. Stopping to explain one’s feelings might be a little more honest and might actually result in someone learning something.
I think Clinton’s main problem goes back to the old joke
"The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you’ve got it made. "
The problem is that unlike most politicians Clinton is really, really bad at this.
Overall I think Clinton’s heart is in the right place, and from what I understand on a one-on-one basis she can be quite warm and understanding. She is a very smart policy wonk, and I think there are good reasons to believe that most of the policies she proposes are well thought out and designed to help as many people as possible. But when it comes to projecting emotional empathy to a mass audience, she just comes as fake. So even though her proposals might be correct on technical grounds it is hard for her to inspire people emotionally. Its like trying to comfort a woman whose child is hospitalized with a sever vaccine reaction, by pointing out that the parent statistically made the right choice to have her child vaccinated. Compare this with Trump who is a loathsome selfish human being without a principled bone in his body, but can read the emotion of a crowd intensify it and project it back so that the crowd feels like he really understand what is going on in their head.
Yes, and unfortunately that reflects mostly on the mass audience. She does tend to be overcautious in what she says publicly, after literally decades of legal entanglements in opposition investigations that found essentially nothing, and that overcaution does come out in public. But I would suggest that it too has its origins in the haters, and not in her actual nature, about which I agree with you.
The Two Minutes Hate stuff worked on Trump and Sanders supporters alike.
Speaking as a liberal (though not necessarily a staunch supporter of the Democratic party, nor what doorhinge would call a “Hillary lover”):
I agree with this. The irony, of course, is that her husband has an uncanny ability to project that empathy.
I think that HRC is very smart, and would have made a much better president than Trump. That said…she always has given me a low-level case of the heebie-jeebies; I think that, to me, she comes across as just a bit too willing to say anything, or do anything, in the pursuit of power and higher office. Absolutely, she (and her husband) have been the targets of repeated witch hunts over the past 25 years, but, IMO, some of those, the Clintons brought on themselves by their own somewhat shady dealings. And, thus, she brought far more baggage into the election – and far more hatred from conservatives – than any other possible Democratic candidate would have.
FWIW, I had some of the same misgivings about Al Gore, when he ran for president in 2000. I certainly liked him much more than GWB, but I got the sense, with him, as well, that some of his principles were negotiable in the pursuit of office.
Also FWIW, I suspect that what I’ve said about HRC’s and Gore’s flaws above are probably true of the vast majority of high-level politicians; I think that it takes a certain personality type to successfully pursue that career, and that that personality type is probably someone who I might not actually like. However, it seems to me that one of HRC’s issues was that she didn’t do as good a job of concealing it as some others have done.
And, fairly or not, I got the sense that, in 2016, HRC was expressing the belief that it was “her turn” (and that she’d also felt that way in 2008).
She has an unlikable combination of arrogance, incompetence, greed, sanctimony, and a thirst for power.
Here is a quote from someone who worked on her healthcare task force
"My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.
So when senior members of the economic team said that key senators like Daniel Patrick Moynihan would have this-and-that objection, she told them they were disloyal. When junior members of the economic team told her that the Congressional Budget Office would say such-and-such, she told them (wrongly) that her conversations with CBO head Robert Reischauer had already fixed that. When long-time senior hill staffers told her that she was making a dreadful mistake by fighting with rather than reaching out to John Breaux and Jim Cooper, she told them that they did not understand the wave of popular political support the bill would generate. And when substantive objections were raised to the plan by analysts calculating the moral hazard and adverse selection pressures it would put on the nation’s health-care system…
Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branch–the equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president."
I know people who worked with her as Secretary of State and did not like her at all.
But, as so often happens in responses from conservatives nowadays, they would be factually, objectively wrong.
It is not in fact true that comparable proportions of conservative and liberal voters these days are equally divorced from reality. The right as a whole has rejected reality-based positions to a far greater extent than the left as a whole (although that’s not to deny that there are some committed reality-rejecters in the liberal camp as well).
That’s nearly three-quarters of Republican voters who are still consciously clinging to one of the most thoroughly debunked, delusional, transparently false rumors ever to be launched in modern US politics.
You can’t normalize that with “both sides do it” rhetoric. Both sides are not equally enmeshed in that kind of irrational political fantasy. Republicans these days have climbed aboard the anti-reality bandwagon in far greater numbers than Democrats.
Again, it is conservatives who keep telling us liberals that us liberals hate the Clintons and want them to go away.
Why do you think you speak for us? I know people make assumptions, but we are telling you we don’t hate Hillary. You guys do. You guys hate her and can’t stand her (on the right). Liberals aren’t excited for her, but we don’t hate her (other than a small minority of progressives).
I hope she never runs for president again, but that isn’t because I dislike her. It is because due to 30 years of right wing propaganda, she is unpopular with a lot of people which may cost her a few million votes. A less unpopular democrat (like Biden) may have gotten 67-68 million votes instead of the 66 million Hillary got, which would’ve swayed the election most likely since Hillary only needed 80k votes in a few states to win.
However I’m happy to have her and Bill opine about politics for the rest of their natural life, and for them to play a role in the party and leftist values.
Yup. The willful misinformation among a huge segment of the right is a major issue that we need to seriously deal with as a nation. I personally would consider the rejection of reality and the support of authoritarian policies on the right among the biggest issues facing America up there with climate change and Islamic terrorism.
We need to figure out how this happened, and if anything can be done to make it better.
This has been a hallmark of the pseudo-dialogue foisted on us by the right, since the early days of Rush Limbaugh, at least. It’s form of seizing control of the discussion, and is remarkable for its arrant dishonesty.
(“These people don’t really want liberty or justice. What they really want…” Rush Limbaugh, some hundreds of times.)
Trump got the crowd to chant “Lock her up!” at his rallies. What weird alternate reality are we in where you are trying to suggest he didn’t lower the political discourse?
Hillary’s “deplorables” comment was spot on IMO, being based on the kind of hatred we saw then and are seeing now.
Trump said plenty of lower-the-discourse stuff about her, just like he said plenty of lower-the-discourse things about illegals and so on. But the OP was out for answers about why two apparently friendly people who’d never come across as extreme or even political – one of them a middle-aged and middle-class wife and mother – would so describe Hillary, sparking this Why The Venom For Hillary? thread.
So I’m saying, it’s possible they (a) never reacted to a Donald Trump insult with a quick “I think he’s talking about me,” but (b) did react to a Hillary Clinton insult with a quick “I think she’s talking about us.” That would explain it, right?
