08-19-2016, 07:47 AM
(08-16-2016, 04:35 PM)David Horn Wrote:(08-15-2016, 05:08 AM)Mikebert Wrote:(08-12-2016, 08:30 AM)David Horn Wrote: Hillary is very talented but also highly flawed. She always sees herself under siege...
Are you suggesting she is not? Presideint Obama is not a Clinton. He is as gifted a pol as Bill--yet he is far more hated on the Right than Bill was. It is likely Hillary will be even more hated than Obama was. Do you deny this?
Do you beleive that there exists an uppity Democrat* who would NOT be under siege by the right?
*Uppity means having the unmitigated gall to believe that someone like them deserves to be president--and then winning.
I don't disagree that, in what may be the final days of their party's existence, the entire GOP roster will do anything and everything to make the not-GOP POTUS squirm. It's about all they have left. In his time, FDR got the same treatment. The difference between then and now is how the response was handled. FDR stood his ground, and gave better than he got. I don't see Hillary in that role, because it's not in her nature. Worse, this is not something that can be handed to surrogates, so it will not get done.
If she had any vision of where she is going and how she might get there, she should be moving her message away from all-Hillary-all-the-time to a unity message with the down-ballot Democrats. She should hang Trump on the entire party and call for a wholesale replacement of Congressional GOPpers with people who will move the country forward, rather than sink in a mire of incompetence. She should encourage others to do likewise ... but she's not.
There's actually a possibility that Pat Toomey might get reelected, yet Hillary is only focusing on herself in PA. And Toomey is only one of several solid targets she's ignoring. She may pay a high price for that starting in January 2017. If the Senate remains in GOP hands, they'll burn the place down before they lift a finger to help her in any way, then they will put the blame on her -- probably with a modicum of success.
Senator Toomey has slipped behind his opponent in the polls. His approval ratings had been poor all year, and the dynamics that got him elected just barely in a Republican wave election (2010) do not now apply. He is on the same ticket as the most unpopular Republican nominee for President since Barry Goldwater, and he must distinguish himself. Doing so, he must display the Far Right ideology that he could keep concealed during the 2010 election while lying low in the Senate since elected to it.
Pennsylvanians may elect an extremist in a statewide election -- once. Maybe it is excessive to hold that he believes, like the Club of Growth in which he was a leader, that no human suffering is in excess if it churns, enforces, or enhances a profit or executive compensation. He cannot present himself as a moderate in one of the most consistently-moderate states of the Union.
The 2016 election is beginning to show signs of being a Democratic wave election. Wave elections elect politicians who can achieve office only in such years. In a reverse wave they get ousted because they were poor matches for their bailiwicks or they were simply substandard pols.
To hold the Senate, Republicans must counteract the tendencies toward a Democratic wave, which means that it must get Senator Toomey re-elected. The Republicans had little chance of gaining any seat except that of the retiring Senator Harry Reid.... and that is close in a state that ordinarily breaks late to the advantage of Democrats in recent elections. Republicans knew all along that Senators Kirk (IL) and Johnson (WI) were going down at the beginning of the year.
Pat Toomey is close to the tipping point for control of the Senate. Considering how vulnerable many incumbent Republican Senators are, Republicans would need a 2010-like or 2014-like wave in their favor to hold onto the Senate. Such will not happen this time.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.