Perhaps not, but she won’t have an uphill fight – and the Pub will. Look at how the Republican candidates have been embarrassing the country when they debate each other – how is any one of them going to fare when he has to debate Clinton?
The historical problem with insurgent candidates for the Dem nomination (e.g. Dean 2004, Bradley 2000, Tsongas 1992 but obviously not Jackson 1984/1988) is that their base usually consists of educated whites, and they tend to do terribly with minorities. Hell, even Obama in 2008 wasn’t immune to this effect - lots of blacks were holding back from supporting him until he showed he had a chance to win. But Iowa solved his problem.
So how much bounce should one expect Bernie to get in SC, which is dominated by the black vote on the Dem side? Not much, really. Blacks, more conservative in a classic sense of the word, would stay with the known quantity of Hillary, and Southern whites would be more suspicious of a New Englander running as the left-flank candidate.
And then the SEC primary comes along at the beginning of March, Hillary rolls into a comfortable lead, and it’s game over.
When dealing with these historical patterns, one can never forget the particularities of the actual election you’re thinking a pattern might apply to. The pattern may have meaning, but it isn’t magical pixie dust.
Since adaher is always talking about how dishonest Hillary Clinton is, this thread seemed like a good place to link to Kevin Drum’s summary of Politifact ratings of the candidates.
The short version:
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Hillary’s the most honest of the bunch, but barely edging out Bernie.
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On the whole, the Dems are a lot more honest than the Republicans.
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Among the major Republican candidates, their popularity is inversely related to their honesty, with Trump and Carson being the least honest, and Jeb being the most honest.
As Kevin says, it’s almost like the GOP base wants to be lied to.
Rubio and Cruz are below Jeb and above Trump/Carson, with Rubio a good deal more honest than Cruz, which means he’s got to step down his game if he hopes to win the nomination. 
I’m surprised at Kevin Drum. Politifact doesn’t measure overall honesty. It checks facts cited by candidates. It tells you nothing about personal honesty and integrity. It does tell you how expensive their research teams are and how well a candidate can stay on script.
BTW, since we are talking about honesty, does anyone find Sanders’ flip flop on her emails to be dishonest? At the debate he seemed to indicate that the story should be put to rest and now he’s using it against her.
Well, I don’t care about her personal integrity - whether Hillary lies to Bill, Chelsea, or Sidney Blumenthal, or whether she’s cheating on Bill with Huma Abedin, is totally outside my sphere of concern.
The question is, is she going to lie to me to win my vote? This suggests that she and Bernie are a good deal less likely than your typical Republican to publicly say things that are false. That’s good enough for me.
And re Kevin Drum: he’s no scientist, but he’s a reasonably smart guy, and he’s willing to work with the tools at hand in the absence of perfect tools. The Politifact ratings were a kind of rough-and-ready measure of the extent to which candidates were likely to speak the truth in public, so he used them. Completely reasonable, and completely in character.
If you’ve got a problem with this, tell me what sorts of Hillary lies that Politifact would let slip through.
How about the way Politifact has checked her statements on her own performance in office?
Her two Pants on Fire are directly from her time in office:
The False statements are also pretty outrageous and stuff that any idiot would know, much less Hillary Clinton.
She’s been hit on a lot of falsehoods, actually. The fact that she also cites a lot of accurate facts does not make her any less a liar.
I mean, the woman’s been cited for more false statements by Politifact than any single Republican save Donald Trump. The fact that she also throws in a “African-Americans are five times more likely to die from asthma” fact does not make her an honest person. In any case, only 51% of her statements have been judged true or mostly true. Which leaves 49% as half truths and outright falsehoods. If she’s honest, we are seriously grading on a curve here. A curve that just happens to benefit her steel-trap mind and very expensive campaign staff that no candidate other than Jeb Bush has.
Bernie Sanders has had a higher percentage of outright false statements than Clinton. But I think if you asked 10 Democrats who the more honest candidate was(including Kevin Drum), I bet 9 of them would say Sanders was more honest without hesitation. Of course, when you have his limited staff, you might say things like “The US spends twice as much per capita as any other country on health care”.
The problem with using fact check sites to determine honesty is that most of the facts checked are not the kinds of things people lie about. It’s just facts they get wrong because the original source was wrong and your ideological team thought it was a given that the fact was true. It’s easy to see how Sanders’ team would not bother to check his per capita figures. It’s a lot harder to explain why Clinton would say she landed under sniper fire or lie blatantly about the TPP.
Politifact measures a combination of honesty and accuracy – both of which are important, but which can be hard to separate because no one can read minds. Pretty much all politicians are dishonest to differing degrees. I think that Hillary is less dishonest than most of the Republicans, and Politifact supports that assertion.
Politifact is good for lots of things but the stats are meaningless. They only check out things that strike somebody as possibly false. Let’s say person A says 1000 things, 950 of which don’t get checked because they’re obviously true. Of the 50 checked, 25 are false. So A has a 50% truth rating. Person B says 75 things, of which 50 get checked. Of those 50, 25 are false. So Person B has the same 50% truth rating. But Person A said 975 true things and 25 false things, and Person B only said 50 true things and 25 false things.
Bottom line is that Hillary has said many things in her 20+ years in the public spotlight. Over such a long time period, there are bound to be misstatements and false memories and the occasional deliberate lie. Trumpy-come-lately and Benny Carson are racking up incredible numbers of lies in a much shorter time frame.
I’d agree that Clinton has a better command of the facts than most Republicans, which is all that Politifact shows. Actually, way better, since her scores are dragged down by the half truths and falsehoods she tells about herself. If you pore over what she gets wrong, it’s mainly when she talks about herself(a subject you think she’d know better than anyone else), and her political opponents. As a matter of fact, 11 of her 15 “False” statements and both of her Pants on Fire statements were about herself or political opponents, rather than citing simple facts. The kind of stuff a candidate might be motivated to lie about. Ben Carson, by contrast, a guy who at this point probably couldn’t get a fact straight about brain surgery, had 10 False and PAnts on Fire statements, only 2 were about himself and none about his opponents. The other 8 were just weird stuff he probably got in his email or something.
So it would seem that Clinton has a great command of the facts, but can’t stop lying about the stuff that actually matters towards getting her elected(her record and her opponents’ records), whereas Carson is just a rookie who says dumb stuff like your co-worker by the water cooler who thinks JFK was killed by the CIA.
But we all agree that Carson is totally unfit for office. Let’s look at Marco Rubio:
Rubio’s record isn’t actually that far from Clinton’s. He trails her 49-51 in True and Mostly True statements and leads her 38-30 in Mostly False or worse statements. I question Kevin Drum’s sincerity first off, because I doubt he’ll support Rubio if he gets ahead of Clinton on the Politifact scale. But let’s look at the nature of Rubio’s lies while we’re here:
2 Pants on Fire, 1 of which was about an opponent(Charlie Crist). And if you read it, it’s a pretty stupid thing too, more hyperbole than an attempt to cite a fact. Politifact should have stayed away from that one entirely. Rubio says that the path to ACA started when Crist supported the stimulus. Politifact should have a category called “whatever!” for stupid hyperbole like that. But we’ll give Rubio 1 of 2 compared to Clinton’s 2 of 2.
Of his 16 false statements, 6 were about himself and his opponents. Once again, most of Rubio’s “lies” were just bad fact checking of actual facts.
OK, a couple things from 2008, and that’s it. Neither one of which really mattered much at the time, and are really kinda nothingburgers now.
Most of the stuff they rate ‘false’ looks more like ‘close enough for government work’ to me.
For instance:
Not wholly, but pretty damn close. And they considered the fact that some other businesses have some limited protection from liability as also undermining the truth of her claim, which strikes me as bullshit.
No, but it seems to be the longest-running investigation of a single incident. Close enough, unless you think the difference has implications other than “it shows that she’s not honest.” Honky, please.
Rubio did, but it was snake-oil stuff. Again, close enough.
And those are the first three I looked at (three of the first four on the list at the link). So I think they were really reaching for some stuff they could say she lied on, in order to maintain their PolitEquate label where they find that Both Sides Do It.
And even with all that reaching, her batting average with them is better than any of the major GOP contenders.
What does that have to do with anything? All that really tells you is that there are other things to evaluate a politician on besides how a quick-and-dirty measure of honesty ranked him or her.
IOW, the stuff they downrated Rubio on sounds a lot like the stuff that they downrated Hillary on. But Hillary’s a liar, and Rubio’s not, according to you.
OK, you hate Hillary. We get it.
I explained the difference pretty clearly. Rubio’s falsehoods were mostly on facts about issues. Clinton’s falsehoods were mainly about herself and her opponents, in other words the kind of stuff that’s helpful to winning elections.
It’s the difference between “global warming doesn’t exist” and “my opponent is a tax cheat”. BTW, I’m sure the Clinton Foundation’s failure to report their taxes correctly isn’t the Clintons’ fault. After all, they only have their name on it and chose who would run it.
This is a great argument for Hillary Clinton, by the way.
Sure, if you believe that grasp of facts is more important than integrity. You might even be right. But I think the voters this time around want something different. Clinton’s honesty numbers are going to be a major problem for her. 36-60 according to the last poll.
Well, to some of us, failure to understand major issues and know the relevant facts is kind of a big deal, if you want to run the whole freakin’ country.
What falsehoods? I gave examples of three falsehoods-that-weren’t. What are your Hillary falsehoods that are (a) real, and (b) “the kind of stuff that’s helpful to winning elections”?
“Global warming doesn’t exist” is the sort of falsehood that could be the difference between life and ruin for hundreds of millions of people, if a climate denier like Rubio gets in office. This is serious shit.
I’d rather have Richard Nixon back from the dead and running things for the next 50 years, as long as he believed that climate change was real and we needed to address it aggressively, than have a denier like Rubio run it, even if Rubio never told another lie.
OK, let’s count Rubio’s:
Pants on Fire: 1 out of 2 was a lie about a political opponent, Charlie Crist.
False: out of 16, 4 were about himself, 2 were about Crist, one was about Obama, one was about the Obama Adminstration, one was about Democrats (all using those labels), and 4 were attacking policies clearly identified with the Obama Administration, though not mentioned by name in the quote (e.g. lying about the Iran deal). So that’s 13/16 that are about himself or political adversaries, “in other words the kind of stuff that’s helpful to winning elections.” Or 14/18 if we include the pants on fire.
Breaking News: Politician lies. Film at 11.
Did Hillary lie about trying to join the Marines?
In 1975 she met with a recruiter who turned her away saying something along the lines of, “You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman.”
Apparently she told this story over 20 years ago and it was met with some skepticism even back then.
She had just moved to Arkansas to be with Bill, who was a sure thing for next Arkansas Attorney General. She, herself, was a rising legal star with an anti-war history. And she wanted to enlist in the military?
Does Hillary need to be worried about the media digging into this?