Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy

[Eric the Green]

(08-30-2016, 12:14 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(08-19-2016, 02:01 PM)Mikebert Wrote:

David Horn Wrote:So why is Hillary in the POTUS race so doggedly?  I'm not a psychologist, but I'll bet it includes (or may consist entirely of) the opportunity to defeat her enemies.  Where we disagree is on her lack of self awareness and even her sense of destiny. I don't see her as insightful at all.  She's certainly dogged and more than adequately scrappy, but I don't see her as a visionary in any sense.  As a visionary, she's the female GHWB.  On score settling, GWB.

We don’t disagree there.  I just don’t think she is stupid* like Trump or intellectually uncurious like GWB. I think your motivation is a reasonable start.  How does becoming another Hoover constitute “defeating her enemies”?  Answer, it doesn’t.  So vison is out.

She is promising small ball, after all, the future is unknowable and if the economic environment continues as it is now, only small ball is possible.  If she wins it is likely Congress will approve Merrit Garland.  And if Ginsburg retires, she will be forced to replace her with a moderate.  Even so, the center of gravity will move to the left, so that’s a win and it will be all she gets. She will use her good working relationships and dogged persistence to make a few small changes, perhaps enough to gain a second term,.  Or perhaps she'll retire out of exhaustion. It’s the best that can be hoped for, from her perspective.
 
On the other hand, what happens if the economy/world order DOES takes a turn for the worse? Suppose the market collapses, there is another financial crisis, and Depression looms.  Yellen meets with her and informs her that the Fed is powerless (they ARE out of ammo and everybody knows it).  The House is adamant, no bailout this time.  They stand ready to insist that everything collapse for surely she will get the blame.  They got revenge for Nixon on her husband and now they are going to get revenge for Hoover.
 
So does she go gently into that good night and let her enemies win without even a fight?  Not if she is “dogged and more than adequately scrappy”.  And that’s what I am hoping for.
 
*stupid is used here as a synonym for unwise rather than unintelligent

I was going to leave this as-is, since I had little to add.  Now, with the Senate races tightening and both candidates heading for the lowest favorability records in recent history, I've changed my mind.

Hillary is showing just how oblivious she is to the maelstrom circling around her, and how little she will bend, even when it's clearly in her favor.  The email and the Clinton Foundation issues continue to drip-drip-drip negatives that are not being ignored by the press or the public.  AS expected, her positives continue to drop along with them.  That she's still ahead of Trump is strictly his doing (he's just that bad), but is that a rational position to hold in the biggest political game in the world?  A strategic thinker would see this as a time to cut losses and mend fences, yet she persists in believing that her positions will prevail or, more likely, the issues will just fade away -- this, after 30+years of dogged opposition by an increasingly frustrated and manic GOP. 

She's a professional player who just happens to be totally tone deaf.  Don't expect anything other than dissonance.  Other than the SCOTUS, I see no upside here.

She is not very deft at handling this situation. It's a strange one she's in though. Most of the charges against her have no merit at all. But Hillary does just enough of an appearance of wrong-doing to give her fanatical enemies enough to use to deceive the people that there's fire behind their smoke. The people can't tell the difference between the truth and the gish gallop. And then she dodges it just enough so they can charge her with distorting the truth. Most of it is simply the result of who the opponents are, and their striking ability to foster the big lie on the people, but the Clintons give them just enough to use against them. It is a kind of complacency combined with justified resistance (often by means of withholding) to the other side's tactics. A bit more complacency on Leo Bill's part, and a bit more resistance on Scorpio Hillary's part.

I don't see that much change over the last few months in Hillary's approval ratings. The Hillary rating seems to have declined from about 45 to about 40 in the last week. The real clear average is down today from -10 to -12. Interesting that the Reuters/Ipsos poll is an outlier, giving both Trump and Clinton higher ratings than the other polls do.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/...html#polls
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/...ility.html

The main problem with Hillary's campaign now is that it's mostly negative, against Trump. That degrades the campaign, since there's nothing but crap from the other side anyway. She needs to tout her own positives and ideas more.